We analyzed 5 million desktop and mobile pages to learn which factors impact page speed.
First, we established worldwide benchmarks for TTFB, Visual Complete and Fully Loaded load time metrics.
Then, we looked at how image compression, CDNs and hosting impact site loading speed.
Our data revealed some very interesting (and surprising) insights.
Here is a Summary of Our Key Findings:
1. In our analysis of 5.2 million pages, the average desktop Time to First Byte (TTFB) speed is 1.286 seconds on desktop and 2.594 seconds on mobile. The average time it takes to fully load a webpage is 10.3 seconds on desktop and 27.3 seconds on mobile.
2. The average web page takes 87.84% longer to load on mobile vs. desktop.
3. When comparing major CMSs against one another, Squarespace and Weebly have the best overall mobile page speed performance. Wix and WordPress ranked near the bottom.
4. On desktop, CDNs have the biggest impact on TTFB. However, on mobile devices, the number of HTML requests seems to affect TTFB the most.
5. Overall page size has a significant impact on desktop and mobile “Visually Complete” loading speed. Larger pages take 318% longer to visually load compared to smaller pages. We also found that gzip compression helps images load more quickly on both desktop and mobile.
6. Total page weight is the #1 determinant of Fully Loaded page speed. Light pages fully load 486% faster than large pages.
7. Wink and Gatsby are the fastest Javascript frameworks. Meteor and Tweenmax are the slowest. The fastest framework is 213% faster than the slowest.
8. Pages with very low or very high file compression have above-average page speed performance (measured via First Contextual Paint).
9. Third-party scripts significantly slow down page loading speed. Each third party script added to a page increases load time by 34.1 milliseconds.
10. We discovered that using responsive images results in the best overall image loading performance. Use of WebP was significantly less effective at reducing image load times.
11. GitHub and Weebly web hosts have the fastest overall TTFB Performance. Siteground and Wix are the slowest among the hosting providers that we analyzed.
12. China, Japan, and Germany have the fastest TTFB loading times. Australia, India and Brazil have the slowest TTBB times.
13. CDN usage was correlated with worse page speed performance. This is likely due to the fact that certain CDNs perform significantly better than others.
Benchmarks for Key Page Speed Load Time Metrics
Our first task was to establish benchmarks for important page speed metrics.
As you may know, “page speed” is actually made up of several distinct stages.
Some of these stages occur at the server level. And others take place within the user’s browser.
And to fully understand how quickly pages load, we needed to drill down into each of these stages.
Specifically, we determined the average speed for:
- TTFB: Time to first byte of HTML doc response
- StartRender: When rendering begins
- Visual Complete: User can see all page assets
- Speed Index: How quickly a user sees a page load
- onLoad: When all page resources (CSS, images, etc.) are downloaded
- Fully Loaded: When a page is 100% loaded in a user’s browser
The average TTFB speed is 1.286 seconds on desktop and 2.594 seconds on mobile.
The average Start Render speed is 2.834 seconds on desktop and 6.709 seconds on mobile.
The average Visual Complete speed is 8.225 seconds on desktop and 21.608 seconds on mobile.
The average Speed Index speed is 4.782 seconds on desktop and 11.455 seconds on mobile.
The average onLoad speed is 8.875 seconds on desktop and 23.608 seconds on mobile.
The average Fully Loaded speed is 10.3 seconds on desktop and 27.3 seconds on mobile.
Key Takeaway: The average page loading speed for a web page is 10.3 seconds on desktop and 27.3 seconds on mobile. On average, pages take 87.84% longer to load on mobile devices than on desktop.
Weebly and Squarespace Have the Best Overall Speed Performance. WordPress Has One of the Worst
When it comes to page speed, which CMS is best?
To answer this question, we determined the CMS used for all of the sites in our data set. We then compared TTFB performance for each CMS that we discovered.
According to our data, Weebly and Squarespace come out on top for desktop.
And for mobile page speed, Squarespace is #1… with Adobe Experience Manager and Weebly rounding out the top 3.
What’s interesting to note is that, when it comes to mobile speed, WordPress is only the 14th best CMS that we analyzed.
Another popular CMS, Wix, also rated poorly for desktop and mobile loading speed.
Although WordPress powers approximately 30% of all websites, it’s clearly not optimized for page loading speed. That’s not to say WordPress is a bad CMS. It has other advantages (like ease of use, a massive library of plugins and SEO) that make it the go-to CMS for many site owners.
However, when looking strictly at website loading speed, it appears that other CMSs have a distinct edge over WordPress.
Key Takeaway: Among major CMSs, Squarespace and Weebly have the best mobile page speed performance. WordPress and Wix rank near the bottom.
Using a CDN May Help Desktop TTFB. Minimizing HTML Requests Is Key For Mobile TTFB
We analyzed the impact that various page characteristics had on TTFB (time to first byte).
Here’s what we found:
https://backlinko.com/page-speed-stats
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