Twenty famous front pages, tested
We tested the front page of each site below against the Web 1.0 Specification (2026 Edition): no scripts, no third parties, no cookies, no bloat. Major faults fail a page; minor faults accumulate. One of the twenty scored an A.
| Result | Site | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Highest grade | NPR (text edition) A | no faults |
| Most major faults | CNN F | 5 major faults |
| Heaviest page | CNN F | 39.7 MB |
| Most requests | BBC F | 564 requests |
| Most third-party hosts | CNN F | 13 hosts |
| Closest failure | motherfuckingwebsite.com D | 1 major, 1 minor |
| Site | Grade | Faults | Weight | Requests | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon | F | 3 major, 2 minor | 2 KB | 2 | Served a 2 KB robot-check page instead of its homepage; even that page has a script, a third-party request, and a cookie. |
| F | 3 major | 8 KB | 2 | Served an 8 KB shell page; it still has scripts, a third-party request, and a cookie. | |
| GitHub | F | 3 major, 2 minor | 561 KB | 131 | Scripts, third-party requests, and cookies. |
| F | 3 major, 4 minor | 582 KB | 14 | Scripts, third-party requests, cookies, and a web font to show a search box. | |
| Wikipedia (English) | F | 3 major, 2 minor | 617 KB | 156 | Close to passing: its third-party requests go to its own sister domain, wikimedia.org. |
| BBC | F | 2 major, 5 minor | 716 KB | 564 | 564 requests for one page. |
| The New York Times | F | 4 major, 5 minor | 1.9 MB | 92 | 1.9 MB, 92 requests, autoplaying media. |
| Apple | F | 4 major, 4 minor | 3.3 MB | 116 | 3.3 MB and 116 requests. |
| YouTube | F | 4 major, 1 minor | 5.8 MB | 23 | 5.9 MB for a page of thumbnails. |
| CNN | F | 5 major, 4 minor | 39.7 MB | 451 | 39.7 MB of first-party transfer, 451 requests, autoplaying media. |
| Site | Grade | Faults | Weight | Requests | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NPR (text edition) | A | no faults | 6 KB | 1 | No faults. The only A. |
| textfiles.com | B | 2 minor | 18 KB | 7 | Passes with two minor hygiene faults. |
| motherfuckingwebsite.com | D | 1 major, 1 minor | 5 KB | 1 | A page that mocks bloated sites, with an analytics script as its punchline. The script is still a major fault. |
| Berkshire Hathaway | F | 2 major, 1 minor | 6 KB | 3 | The famously plain page loads Google Analytics, placed before the doctype. |
| danluu.com | F | 2 major, 3 minor | 22 KB | 2 | A minimal page that fails on a Cloudflare analytics beacon. |
| Craigslist | F | 2 major, 2 minor | 68 KB | 4 | Plain-looking, but ships scripts and sets cookies. |
| Drudge Report | F | 2 major, 6 minor | 97 KB | 25 | 1997-style HTML with current tracking scripts. |
| 250kb.club | F | 2 major | 110 KB | 4 | Under its own 250 KB size budget, but its third-party analytics script is two major faults. |
| CNN (lite edition) | F | 2 major | 333 KB | 6 | The lite edition still ships JavaScript and sets six cookies. |
| Low-tech Magazine (solar) | F | 2 major | 484 KB | 19 | The solar-powered site loads Plausible analytics: a script and a third party. |
Front pages only, fetched once on 2026-08-15 08:04 UTC with an ordinary browser User-Agent. Weight counts first-party bytes only, measured uncompressed. The checker never fetches third-party resources, so their size is not counted. Grades follow the spec exactly.