WordPress speed statistics: 636 websites measured

By Christian Schreiber · Updated October 17, 2026

WordPress runs anything from a small blog to a large news site, and the spread in speed is correspondingly wide. The core is not the problem. Theme, plugins and hosting decide how fast a WordPress site loads, and the same CMS can produce both the fastest and the slowest pages in a sample.

Causes and fixes: Core Web Vitals for WordPress.

By Core Web Vitals pass rate, WordPress ranks third of six platforms with their own page, behind Shopify, ahead of Next.js. Clearest advantage over all measured websites: JavaScript (median), 1.2 MB against 1.5 MB. Largest gap: Time to First Byte (median), 845 ms against 693 ms.

Core Web Vitals on WordPress

51% of the 636 measured WordPress websites pass all three Core Web Vitals with real-user data. Across all measured websites the figure is 48%.

Metric	Good	Median	Middle half	Threshold
LCP	66%	2053 ms	1562 ms – 3002 ms	2500 ms
INP	86%	119 ms	88 ms – 165 ms	200 ms
CLS	80%	0.03	0.00 – 0.08	0.10

Median mobile Lighthouse score: 49. Why lab score and field data diverge is explained in the Website Speed Statistics.

Who runs WordPress in this sample

The WordPress sites in this sample range from publishers and universities to restaurants and small business sites, on hosting from shared servers to managed enterprise platforms. That mix is why the middle half of the distribution is wide: two WordPress sites can differ more from each other than from the average site on another platform.

How to read your own WordPress values

Compare your values with the middle half rather than the median alone, and look at time to first byte first. On WordPress it reflects hosting and page caching directly, so it separates well-run installations from the rest more clearly than any other metric here. A site that is fast in the lab but slow in the field can indicate that real visitors get uncached pages, for example after login or with query strings in the URL.

WordPress by region

Field data of WordPress websites per region.

Region	Websites	Pass all three	LCP p50	INP p50	CLS p50
Worldwide	636	51%	2053 ms	119 ms	0.03
DACH	63	71%	1609 ms	100 ms	0.02
United Kingdom	36	64%	2010 ms	119 ms	0.06

From 30 websites per region.

More metrics: TTFB, FCP, TBT and Speed Index

Thresholds and sources: Website Speed Statistics.

Metric	Source	Good	WordPress median	All websites median	Threshold
Time to First Byte	Field data	48%	845 ms	693 ms	800 ms
First Contentful Paint	Field data	53%	1720 ms	1545 ms	1800 ms
Total Blocking Time	Lab	33%	424 ms	680 ms	200 ms
Speed Index	Lab	6%	8548 ms	8657 ms	3400 ms

Page weight and third-party code

A WordPress home page transfers 4.6 MB at the median, of which 1.2 MB is JavaScript. 96% load third-party code, from a median of five providers.

Provider	Share	Main thread (median)
Google Tag Manager	72%	354 ms
Meta (Facebook)	28%	273 ms
Google Ads (DoubleClick)	23%	172 ms
Google Fonts	20%	< 1 ms
Other Google APIs and SDKs	17%	43 ms
Google CDN	17%	302 ms

Most common lab findings

Finding	Share	Saving (median)
Render-blocking resources	94%	8985 ms
Unused JavaScript	80%	1500 ms
Unused CSS	78%	450 ms
Images not properly sized	77%	1631 ms
Images not in next-gen formats	60%	2431 ms

Typical WordPress performance bottlenecks

Page builders and plugin-heavy setups load CSS and JavaScript on every page, whether a page needs it or not. Without server-side page caching, time to first byte rises quickly under load. The most effective fixes are usually a caching layer, fewer plugins that inject front-end assets, and properly sized images.