When the scan finishes, the report shows five numbers. Here’s what each one tells you and which to care about first.
Score
A 0–100 grade computed from response times, error rate, and pages tested. Above 80 is green/FAST; 60–79 is OK; 40–59 is SLOW; under 40 is BROKEN. The score is a quick comparator across runs of the same site over time. It’s not directly comparable across very different sites because page weight matters.
P95 response time
The time below which 95% of your responses arrive. This is the number that matters most. Average response time hides the slow tail. If your average is 200 ms but P95 is 4 seconds, one user in 20 is sitting through a 4-second page load — and they’re the ones who bounce. Anything under 1 second is excellent for a content site, under 2 seconds is fine, over 3 seconds is a problem worth investigating.
Error rate
Percentage of requests that returned a 5xx (server error) or failed to connect. We separate “bot-protection rejected us” from “real server error” — if you see BLOCKED rather than BROKEN, your site is probably fine and our walk got pushed off the edge.
Slowest page
The single page in the walk with the highest response time. Often the most actionable line in the report — if /pricing takes 3 seconds while every other page is under 500 ms, you have a specific page-level problem to look at, not a site-wide one.
Pages walked
How many pages we actually visited. We start from your home and walk same-origin links up to 20 pages, prioritised by sitemap.xml if you have one. If we walked 1 page when your sitemap claims 200, the walk is being suppressed somewhere — usually by a bot manager, sometimes by a robots.txt rule.
What to do with these
- P95 over 2 seconds → look at the slowest page list, find the offender, optimise it (caching, query, image weight)
- Error rate over 1% → check server logs for the same time window
- Verdict BLOCKED → that’s a different problem; see Why your site got the BLOCKED verdict
- All-green → save the URL as your before-state baseline; re-run after every meaningful change
If a number doesn’t make sense for your site, post it in the Reading results Community board — context-aware answers from people running similar setups.