A fast home page
What we check
We time how long your home page takes to arrive, from the first request to the last byte, adding up every redirect along the way. Under two seconds scores 1, under four scores 0.5, and anything slower scores 0. We also report the time to the first byte, for your developer.
Why it matters
When someone asks an assistant a question, it often fetches pages live, while they wait. It won’t wait long. A slow page gets cut off partway or skipped in favor of one that answered faster.
It’s a small weight because speed is rarely the whole story, but a home page that takes six seconds is a home page that sometimes isn’t read at all.
How to pass
- Measure it yourself:
curl -s -o /dev/null -w "first byte %{time_starttransfer}s, total %{time_total}s\n" https://example.com/ - If the first byte is slow, the server is doing too much work per request. Turn on page caching, or put a CDN in front of the site.
- If the total is slow, the page is too big. Look for huge inline images, scripts, or data embedded in the HTML.
- Remove redirect hops; each one adds a round trip (see the host rule).