Matan · SEO · Performance

Load time

How long the HTML document takes to download from our crawler — a floor under real user speed.

Pass condition in our engine: HTML download time is under 1 second (warning under 2s; fail at 2s+).

1. Problem description

Slow HTML delays everything else: CSS, LCP, and crawler throughput. We measure server-side fetch time, not a browser’s full load event. Under 1s is healthy; past 4s is critical for this check.

2. Most common causes

  • Uncached origin rendering (heavy PHP/Node per request).
  • No CDN; the server is far from the crawler.
  • Huge HTML with inlined images or CSS.

3. How to fix it

  1. Cache HTML at the edge where the page is public.
  2. Cut TTFB (see the TTFB check) and enable compression.
  3. Remove multi-megabyte inline payloads from the document.

Test this check

We fetch only this URL (plus robots.txt / llms.txt at the domain root when the check needs them). We do not crawl the rest of the site like a full report.

Scoring rules for the full site crawl are documented in methodology. Want every category at once? Generate a free report.

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