New reports on page loading speeds

Posted by Matthias Gelbmann on 1 February 2023 in News

Page speed measurements

Google publishes monthly the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX), which includes several measurements indicating page loading speeds as collected from real users via their Chrome browser sessions. We use this data set to calculate average page speeds for the technologies on our surveys. This gives interesting insights into the performance of those technologies. We can show which is the fastest content management system, web server, hosting provider, and so on.

We take this real-world data and combine them with our data on technology usage. That enables us to compare average page speeds of competing technologies. We use two measurements:

• Time to First Byte (TTFB) measures the time it takes to establish the connection to the web server until content starts to be served, see TTFB definition. This measurement is most useful for technologies that are involved in that part of page serving, for example web servers.
• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures the time starting from when a web page first starts loading up to the point when the largest image or text block becomes visible within the page, see LCB definition. This measurement is most useful for technologies that create and deliver the actual content of a page, for example content management systems.

In our reports, we include technologies, for which we have at least 100 measurements, and calculate the average of all these sites.

A word of warning

Before we have a look at some of the results, a word of warning. What we can say is, that web sites that use certain technologies are on average faster that websites that use other technologies. That does not necessarily mean that these technologies per se offer different performance. If, for example, CMS 1 happens to be used primarily for simple sites, whereas CMS 2 is mostly used for complex sites, then we can expect CMS 1 to deliver faster results on average. However, it could still be the case that, when implementing exactly the same website in CMS 1 and CMS 2, that CMS 2 could win in such a test. The speed of a web site certainly depends on the technology in use, but also, and perhaps more so, on the functionality the site is able to provide.

Perhaps an example helps to make that point clear: the fastest JavaScript library, according to the CrUX measurements is Spry. Spry is a library developed by Adobe that has seen its last update 10 years ago. It seems to be fast for what it does. JavaScript frameworks such as React, Angular and Vue are significantly slower than Spry, but the work they typically do on a website puts them in a different class. A truck is not as fast as a sports car, but only because the car is not designed to carry the same load.

There are many other factors that may have an impact on these measurements. For example, South Korea is well known to have excellent internet connection speeds. The fastest web hosting provider in our surveys is MakeShop Korea. While we congratulate them to that achievement, the overall infrastructure in their home country certainly helped to get that result. On top of that, web sites that have a strong geographical focus will always have an advantage to achieve better average connection speeds than sites that serve a global audience. Please consider such dependencies when drawing conclusions from our reports.

Some more highlights

There are quite a few surprises among the fastest technologies. Big Cartel, the e-commerce platform for artists, is the fastest content management system, ahead of Web to date, a web editor that produces static pages, and the already mentioned MakeShop Korea.

The fastest server-side language is C. C is rarely used for generating websites, but it is well known as a fast language. Miva Script is also a niche language coming second, whereas is could be expected that serving static files is among the most performing options.

Another surprising result is UploadServer, based on Pythons http.server module, coming as fastest web server.

I mentioned already South Koreas reputation for fast internet services. The top 3 data center providers in that ranking are all based in that country: SK Broadband, SK Group and KT Corporation.

The fastest reverse proxy service is Fastly, followed by DDoS-Guard and Section.

.kr (South Korea) as fastest top level domain confirms other statistics mentioned above. .mo (Macao) and .jp (Japan) are more examples of fast Asian networks. The fastest server locations paint a similar picture.

More details

You find these and more results on our site by clicking on the "page speed" link in the menu of each technology category. More details, including the full list of all technologies can be found in our reports.

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Please note, that all trends and figures mentioned in that article are valid at the time of writing. Our surveys are updated frequently, and these trends and figures are likely to change over time.

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