Drupal speed statistics: 263 websites measured

By Christian Schreiber · Updated October 16, 2026

Drupal is common among public institutions, universities and publishers. Its built-in page cache and CSS and JavaScript aggregation give it a solid starting point for fast loading.

By Core Web Vitals pass rate, Drupal ranks first of six platforms with their own page, ahead of Shopify. Clearest advantage over all measured websites: Pass all three Core Web Vitals, 64% against 49%.

Core Web Vitals on Drupal

64% of the 263 measured Drupal 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	81%	1765 ms	1336 ms – 2353 ms	2500 ms
INP	86%	110 ms	84 ms – 150 ms	200 ms
CLS	80%	0.03	0.01 – 0.08	0.10

Median mobile Lighthouse score: 45. Why lab score and field data diverge is explained in the Website Speed Statistics.

Who runs Drupal in this sample

Drupal sites in this sample come mostly from public institutions, universities, publishers and non-profits. Many of them are large content sites with many editors, where pages are built from reusable components and filled with media uploaded over many years.

How to read your own Drupal values

Since public and education sites dominate, compare your values with the median of this sample and pay particular attention to the mobile data, as these sites reach a broad audience that includes older devices. Time to first byte shows whether the page cache works for anonymous visitors. Large gaps between pages of the same site usually come from content, such as embeds and images, rather than from the template.

More metrics: TTFB, FCP, TBT and Speed Index

Thresholds and sources: Website Speed Statistics.

Metric	Source	Good	Drupal median	All websites median	Threshold
Time to First Byte	Field data	70%	618 ms	684 ms	800 ms
First Contentful Paint	Field data	67%	1526 ms	1536 ms	1800 ms
Total Blocking Time	Lab	24%	500 ms	771 ms	200 ms
Speed Index	Lab	4%	7877 ms	8631 ms	3400 ms

Page weight and third-party code

A Drupal home page transfers 3.8 MB at the median, of which 1.2 MB is JavaScript. 98% load third-party code, from a median of five providers.

Provider	Share	Main thread (median)
Google Tag Manager	81%	458 ms
Meta (Facebook)	29%	257 ms
Google Analytics	20%	< 1 ms
OneTrust (Optanon)	18%	119 ms
Other Google APIs and SDKs	14%	74 ms
Microsoft Clarity	12%	77 ms

Most common lab findings

Finding	Share	Saving (median)
Render-blocking resources	95%	6741 ms
Unused JavaScript	93%	1675 ms
Unused CSS	87%	450 ms
Images not properly sized	75%	1631 ms
Images not in next-gen formats	60%	2973 ms

Typical Drupal performance bottlenecks

Where Drupal sites fall behind, the cause is usually outside the core: unoptimized images uploaded by editors, embedded third-party widgets and contributed modules that add front-end assets. Image styles with modern formats and a review of embeds per page type help the most.