The Core Web Vitals technology report shows that five out of six of the most popular content management systems performed worse in April 2024 compared to the beginning of the year. Real-world performance data collected by HTTPArchive offers some clues as to why performance scores are trending downward.
Core Web Vitals technology report
The Core Web Vitals (CWV) rankings are a mix of real-world and lab data. The real-world data comes from the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) and the lab data comes from a public HTTP archive dataset (lab data based on the websites included in the ‘CrUX report).
The data is used to create the Core Web Vitals technology report that can be sliced and diced to measure mobile and desktop performance for a wide variety of content management systems in any combination, as well as provide data about JavaScript, HTML CSS and image weight. data
Data reported in Search Engine Journal articles are based on mobile data measurements. Scores are presented as percentages representing the percentages of website visits that resulted in a good Core Web Vitals (CWV) score.
Here is the history of the HTTP archive score for CWV:
“Web Basics Vitals
There can be different approaches to measuring the performance of a website or group of websites with CWV. The approach used by this dashboard is designed to more closely match CWV’s assessment in PageSpeed Insights”
Here’s background information about the HTTP Archive Lab data:
“HTTP Archive measures individual web pages, not entire websites. And due to capacity limitations, HTTP Archive is limited to testing one page per website. The most natural page to test for a given website is the your home page, or the origin’s root page.”
source of quotations, HTTP file.
Main performance of the main vitals of the web
The highest-performing content management system (CMS) of the six CMSs compared is Duda, a closed-source website building platform used by agencies and developers to build and manage large portfolios of client sites. 71% of website visits resulted in a good basic web vitals score. Duda’s score is 13 percentage points ahead of second-place winner Squarespace, another closed-source website building platform.
Sites built with Duda have a higher CWV performance than any other CMS, by a wide margin. Squarespace, Drupal, and Wix are grouped together with similar performance scores, with Joomla and WordPress scoring fifth and sixth.
WordPress is faster, but other factors slow it down
Although WordPress ranks sixth, its performance did not drop as much as the other leading content management systems, likely reflecting the many performance improvements in
present in every new version of WordPress. WordPress 6.5, released in early April 2024, it included more than 100 performance improvements in the backend and front end.
WordPress’ performance score was slightly lower in April 2024 than earlier this year, but by less than a percentage point. However, this percentage drop is lower than the top-ranked CMS, Duda, which saw a drop of 5.41 percentage points.
Chrome Lighthouse is an automated tool for measuring website performance. Lighthouse scores for WordPress in January of this year were 35%, meaning 35% of measured WordPress sites had a good Lighthouse CWV score. CWV’s score dropped in February and March, but returned to 35% in April, perhaps reflecting the many performance improvements in WordPress version 6.5.
Average page weight scores are likely where performance lagged. The weight of the page is the average number of bytes sent to the network, which could be compressed. The average page weight for WordPress sites started at 568.48 in January and rose to 579.92, an increase of 11.44.
The average download size of images compared between January and April 2024 increased by 49.5 kilobytes, but this has more to do with how publishers are using WordPress than how WordPress is being used. This could be contributing to the essentially flat yield change this year. But again, virtually no change in performance is better than what’s happening with other content management systems that experienced larger drops in their performance rates.
Best CWV performance by CMS
The CWV performance list represents the percentage of sites using a given CMS that have a good CWV score. Here is the list of the best results with their respective percentages:
Doubt 71% Squarespace 58% Drupal 54% Wix 52% Joomla 43% WordPress 38%
Low performance by CMS
The CMS performance drop comparison shows a strange trend where four out of six content management systems had relatively high performance drops. Below is a comparison of performance drops in percentage points, indicated by a minus sign.
List by performance change
Wix -7.11 Duda -5.41 Joomla -2.84 Drupal -2.58 WordPress -0.71
As you can see above, WordPress had the lowest drop in performance. Wix and Duda had the steepest drops in performance, while Squarespace was the only CMS with a performance increase, with a positive score of +3.92.
Core Web Vitals Scores – Takeout
Duda is clearly the performance champion of Core Web Vitals, outperforming all content management systems in this comparison. Squarespace, Wix, and Drupal are all close in a tight pack. Of the six platforms in this comparison, only Squarespace managed to improve its scores this year.
All other platforms in this comparison performed less well in April compared to the beginning of the year, possibly due to increased page weight, especially on images, but there could be something else that explains this anomaly that is not accounted for in the HTTP Archive reports.
The WordPress performance team continues to make significant improvements to WordPress core, and the slight drop in performance of less than one percent may be due to how publishers use the platform.
It’s safe to say that every platform in this comparison is a winner because they all show consistent improvements overall.
Explore the The HTTP archive web vitals report here.
Featured image by Shutterstock/Roman Samborskyi
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