How the website score works
Every score comes from measurements of the site's homepage, taken the same way for every site. Nothing is written or judged by AI. The same measurements always give the same score.
The parts of the score
The score is a weighted average of these parts, each from 0 to 100. Weights add up to 100.
| Part | Weight | Source | What it measures |
|---|---|---|---|
| Speed | 20 | Google PageSpeed Insights, mobile | Lighthouse performance score on a mid-range phone. |
| Core Web Vitals | 15 | Google PageSpeed Insights, mobile | Real visitors' Chrome data when Google has it: the share of LCP, INP and CLS rated fast. Otherwise the lab LCP, TBT and CLS scores, averaged. |
| Accessibility | 15 | axe-core in a phone render, and the homepage | Every WCAG 2.2 A/AA and best-practice rule axe-core runs, plus our own checks (alt text, page language, link and field labels). Each rule counts once; a pass earns 1, a moderate or minor failure ½, a serious or critical one 0. Google's Lighthouse score is used only when axe could not run. |
| SEO | 15 | Homepage fetch and Google PageSpeed Insights | Our SEO checklist below: indexability, title, description, headline, robots.txt, canonical, sitemap, structured data and previews, plus any Lighthouse SEO audit that fails. |
| Best practices | 10 | Homepage fetch, a phone render and Google PageSpeed Insights | Our best-practices checklist below: viewport, doctype, sideways scrolling, broken images, tap targets and script errors, plus any Lighthouse best-practice audit that fails. |
| Security and trust | 10 | Homepage fetch | HTTPS, the http-to-https redirect, mixed content, security headers and broken links. Share of checks passed; a warning counts half. |
| Content and conversion | 10 | Homepage fetch and a phone render | Calls to action above the fold, contact routes, forms and trust signals, and for local businesses LocalBusiness data, a phone number and opening hours. Share of checks passed; a warning counts half. |
| Email authentication | 5 | Public DNS records | SPF (25, plus 15 for -all or 10 for ~all), DMARC (25, plus 25 for reject or 15 for quarantine) and a DKIM key on a common selector (10). |
SEO and Best practices checklists
Google's Lighthouse SEO and Best practices scores come from short pass/fail lists that most well-built sites max out, so a site could score 100 while its review still listed issues. We score these two parts from the checks in the review instead. Each check earns its points when it passes, half when it is a warning and none when it fails. The part is the share of points earned. A Lighthouse audit that fails adds 5 points to the total (20 when it stops the page being crawled or served securely), so every listed issue lowers the score. Google's own number is still shown beside ours on each review.
| Page may be indexed (no noindex) | 20 |
| Page title, 30 to 65 characters | 15 |
| Meta description, 70 to 160 characters | 10 |
| One H1 headline | 10 |
| robots.txt present and not blocking the site | 8 |
| Canonical URL on the same host | 8 |
| XML sitemap reachable | 8 |
| Valid structured data (JSON-LD) | 8 |
| Open Graph preview image | 6 |
| At least 5 internal links | 4 |
| Favicon declared | 3 |
| Mobile viewport declared | 20 |
| HTML doctype | 6 |
| Character set declared | 6 |
| No sideways scrolling on a phone | 12 |
| No broken images | 12 |
| Tap targets at least 24 px | 10 |
| No JavaScript errors while loading | 10 |
When a site is ranked
- The speed test must have run. Google's test sometimes fails or hits its daily limit, and a site without it cannot be compared fairly.
- Parts carrying at least 70% of the total weight must have been measured. A part that could not be measured is left out of the average rather than counted as zero.
- The homepage must have loaded with a normal response. Error pages are not ranked.
- Each site is scored from its latest review. Ties share a rank.
Grades
A: 90 and up · B: 80 to 89 · C: 70 to 79 · D: 60 to 69 · F: 0 to 59
Which boards a site is on
- Platform: the store or site builder the homepage is served by. Only evidence the platform itself serves counts: its asset URLs (such as Shopify's CDN), its generator tag, its own scripts, or its response headers. A link to the platform or its name in the page text never counts. When the homepage shows none, programmable.info's technology detection is used.
- Stores: built on a store platform (Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento, PrestaShop, Big Cartel, Ecwid, Shopware, OpenCart, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Volusion, Shift4Shop), or on a site builder with a link to a cart or checkout.
- SaaS: not a store, and the homepage links to at least 3 of pricing, sign-up, log-in, docs, a status page and a demo request, one of them pricing or sign-up.
- Size: the Tranco top-1M popularity rank, in bands of the top 10,000, 100,000 and 1 million. Sites outside the list have no band.
- Curated lists, such as SaaS subcategories, are lists of domains we chose. Inside them, the score and rank are computed exactly as everywhere else.
What we publish
A public board names its top 50 sites. We never publish a list of the lowest-scoring sites. Every site can see its own score and rank on its review page. To have a site removed from the boards and reviews, email [email protected].
Scoring method version 4. Back to the leaderboards.