The most-visited sites, and the well-made ones
Three kinds of sites are tracked in this registry. The web's most-visited sites, graded uninvited, because how they treat their visitors is a public matter. A commended list of well-regarded sites - most of them smaller and more specialised - that show what passing looks like. And sites whose owners ask to be tracked. Grades follow the spec exactly: no scripts, no third parties, no cookies, no bloat. Passing is a choice. The commended sites made it; most of the giants did not.
Twenty famous front pages, tested at launch and rechecked since. The full list of most-visited domains is on the results page.
| Site | Grade | Faults | Weight | Requests | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon | F | 2 major, 1 minor | 2 KB | 2 | Often serves a small robot-check page instead of its homepage; even that page has a script, a third-party request, and a cookie. |
| Apple | F | 4 major, 4 minor | 2.3 MB | 111 | Several megabytes across more than a hundred requests. |
| BBC | F | 2 major, 5 minor | 645 KB | 480 | Hundreds of requests for a single page. |
| CNN | F | 5 major, 4 minor | 39.3 MB | 490 | Tens of megabytes of first-party transfer, hundreds of requests, autoplaying media. |
| GitHub | F | 3 major, 2 minor | 563 KB | 137 | Scripts, third-party requests, and cookies. |
| F | 3 major, 4 minor | 618 KB | 15 | Scripts, third-party requests, cookies, and a web font to show a search box. | |
| The New York Times | F | 3 major, 1 minor | 1 KB | 2 | Scripts, third parties, and cookies before the news arrives. |
| Wikipedia (English) | F | 3 major, 2 minor | 617 KB | 159 | Its third-party requests go to its own sister domain, wikimedia.org. |
| YouTube | F | 4 major, 1 minor | 5.9 MB | 23 | Megabytes of transfer to show a grid of thumbnails. |
| — | declined by robots.txt | Its robots.txt disallows all crawlers, so checks are declined. | |||
Celebrated minimalist sites from the same launch test. Several failed on their own analytics scripts.
| Site | Grade | Faults | Weight | Requests | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| textfiles.com | B | 2 minor | 18 KB | 7 | Passes, with minor hygiene faults only. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Berkshire Hathaway | F | 2 major, 1 minor | 6 KB | 3 | The famously plain page loads Google Analytics, placed before the doctype. |
| Craigslist | F | 2 major, 2 minor | 69 KB | 4 | Plain-looking, but ships scripts and sets cookies. |
| Drudge Report | F | 2 major, 6 minor | 96 KB | 26 | 1997-style HTML with current tracking scripts. |
| Low-tech Magazine (solar) | F | 2 major | 511 KB | 19 | The solar-powered site loads Plausible analytics: a script and a third party. |
| danluu.com | F | 2 major, 3 minor | 22 KB | 2 | A minimal page that fails on a Cloudflare analytics beacon. |
| CNN (lite edition) | — | declined by robots.txt | The lite edition still ships JavaScript and sets cookies. | ||
| NPR (text edition) | — | declined by robots.txt | Its robots.txt disallows all crawlers, so checks are declined. | ||
Well-regarded sites, most of them specialised, that pass. Listed on our judgment and verified before admission; each is rechecked like everything else, and a commended site that stops passing loses its place.
| Site | Grade | Faults | Weight | Requests | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| openbsd.org | A | none | 141 KB | 5 | The OpenBSD project's hand-written pages. |
| sr.ht | A | none | 137 KB | 4 | A software forge; every page works without JavaScript. |
| busybox.net | B | 1 minor | 267 KB | 4 | The single-binary Unix toolbox for embedded systems. |
| cat-v.org | B | 1 minor | 12 KB | 4 | The Plan 9 community's site. |
| curl.se | B | 3 minor | 109 KB | 15 | Home of the curl data-transfer tool. |
| floodgap.com | B | 4 minor | 1 KB | 1 | Gopher advocacy and vintage-computing projects. |
| gutenberg.org | B | 2 minor | 629 KB | 32 | Tens of thousands of public-domain books. |
| kernel.org | B | 3 minor | 399 KB | 23 | Distribution point for the Linux kernel source. |
| lite.duckduckgo.com/lite | B | 1 minor | 16 KB | 7 | DuckDuckGo HTML-only search, built for browsers without JavaScript. |
| musl.libc.org | B | 1 minor | 16 KB | 4 | The musl C standard library. |
| nginx.org | B | 1 minor | 47 KB | 7 | Documentation home of the nginx web server. |
| suckless.org | B | 1 minor | 134 KB | 4 | The suckless project's tools and manifesto. |
| wiby.me | B | 1 minor | 14 KB | 3 | A search engine for hand-made pages. |
| zlib.net | B | 1 minor | 73 KB | 9 | The zlib compression library. |
To join the third group, submit your site. Approved sites appear on the results page, and a passing site may display the badge.