Download websites that use Priority Hints

About Priority Hints

Priority Hints is a single attribute on a tag, which makes it one of the smaller things we record and one of the more revealing. A developer marks an image or a script as high or low priority and the browser's network scheduler obeys, fetching the hero image sooner and the tracking script later. Nobody adds that attribute by accident or by habit. Its presence means somebody was looking at a waterfall chart and did not like what they saw.

The mechanism was proposed in 2021, is specified in the open and shipped under Open Source terms, and as of September 2026 we see it on 26,142,125 sites. The count is larger than a story about hand tuning alone would suggest, and the explanation is that frameworks, themes and page builders learned to emit the attribute automatically for the main image above the fold. So the population splits into two groups that look identical in the file. Teams that tuned their pages, and teams that installed something which tunes pages for them.

Separating those two groups is where the dataset stops being a curiosity. Crossed with the framework, content management and page builder columns on the same row, the attribute either co-occurs with a platform known to emit it or it does not, and the domains where it does not are the ones with a performance engineer somewhere in the building. Recruiters, developer tooling vendors and consultancies all want that second and much smaller list, and there is no way to construct it one domain at a time.

The first reading is a signal about talent and budget. The second is a measurement of how quickly a browser feature travels from specification to ordinary practice once a widely used framework adopts it. Standards bodies, browser teams and framework maintainers argue about that question using samples of prominent sites, which is the wrong instrument, because prominent sites adopt everything early and tell you nothing about the shape of the curve behind them. A full population file gives the boring answer instead, including the long tail that never updates anything.

United States accounts for 13,771,091 of the sites carrying the attribute and .com holds the suffix weight. The concentration says less about where careful developers live than about where hosting and template ecosystems sit, since our country column is derived from serving infrastructure rather than from ownership. Segment on suffix and page language when the question is about a national market, and keep the country column for what it is good at, which is grouping infrastructure.

Detection is exactly as literal as it sounds. We record that the attribute appeared in the markup of the page we fetched, not that its value is sensible, not that it helped, and not that the rest of the page deserves it. A site can mark every image as important and achieve nothing at all, and the file cannot tell you so. Rendering matters here too, because markup injected by a client side framework after load may not be present in the response we parse, which pushes some genuinely tuned sites into the absent column. Read the field as evidence of intent, verify execution yourself on the domains that matter, and use the download for the thing a lookup cannot do, which is comparing whole populations across platforms, markets and time.