Contentful speed statistics: 156 websites measured

By Christian Schreiber · Updated October 16, 2026

Contentful is a headless CMS: it stores the content, and a separate front end, often built with Next.js or Gatsby, renders it. Speed therefore depends far more on that front end and its hosting than on Contentful itself.

By Core Web Vitals pass rate, Contentful ranks fifth of six platforms with their own page, behind Next.js, ahead of Adobe Experience Manager. Clearest advantage over all measured websites: Page weight (median), 4.0 MB against 4.3 MB. Largest gap: Pass all three Core Web Vitals, 38% against 49%.

Core Web Vitals on Contentful

38% of the 156 measured Contentful websites pass all three Core Web Vitals with real-user data. Across all measured websites the figure is 49%.

Metric	Good	Median	Middle half	Threshold
LCP	65%	2167 ms	1613 ms – 2796 ms	2500 ms
INP	60%	167 ms	127 ms – 235 ms	200 ms
CLS	72%	0.04	0.01 – 0.13	0.10

Median mobile Lighthouse score: 39. Why lab score and field data diverge is explained in the Website Speed Statistics.

Who runs Contentful in this sample

Contentful only stores the content, so the sites in this sample are really a group of custom front ends: brand sites, shops and media sites built with frameworks such as Next.js, Gatsby or Nuxt by in-house teams or agencies. The numbers describe those front ends and their hosting, with Contentful as the shared backend.

How to read your own Contentful values

Compare your values with sites that use the same front-end framework; the platform pages for those frameworks show their own distribution. Image metrics are the part Contentful influences directly, through its Images API. Everything else, from time to first byte to INP, belongs to the front end and is best compared on that level.

More metrics: TTFB, FCP, TBT and Speed Index

Thresholds and sources: Website Speed Statistics.

Metric	Source	Good	Contentful median	All websites median	Threshold
Time to First Byte	Field data	61%	730 ms	684 ms	800 ms
First Contentful Paint	Field data	65%	1485 ms	1536 ms	1800 ms
Total Blocking Time	Lab	13%	977 ms	771 ms	200 ms
Speed Index	Lab	3%	8545 ms	8631 ms	3400 ms

Page weight and third-party code

A Contentful home page transfers 4.0 MB at the median, of which 1.8 MB is JavaScript. 99% load third-party code, from a median of five providers.

Provider	Share	Main thread (median)
Google Tag Manager	73%	426 ms
Contentful CDN (ctfassets.net) part of the platform	32%	< 1 ms
Meta (Facebook)	28%	312 ms
OneTrust (Optanon)	26%	125 ms
Google CDN	11%	465 ms
TikTok	11%	142 ms

“Part of the platform”: Lighthouse counts these files as third-party because they load from a domain of the platform itself. They belong to the system and cannot be removed like tracking scripts.

Most common lab findings

Finding	Share	Saving (median)
Render-blocking resources	88%	3268 ms
Unused JavaScript	87%	2100 ms
Images not properly sized	74%	1483 ms
Unused CSS	49%	300 ms
Images not in next-gen formats	28%	2323 ms

Typical Contentful performance bottlenecks

Typical issues are large JavaScript bundles from the front-end framework and images served at full size from the asset API. The Contentful Images API can resize and convert images to modern formats on request, which addresses the image part directly.