WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, Joomla, Duda, & Drupal

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By Chris Barnhart Last updated May 30, 2024

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The Core Web Vitals technology report shows that five out of six of the most popular content management systems performed worse in April 2024 when compared to the beginning of the year. The real-world performance data collected by HTTPArchive offers some clues about why performance scores are trending downward.

Core Web Vitals Technology Report

The rankings for Core Web Vitals (CWV) 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 is from an HTTP Archive public dataset (lab data based on the websites included in the CrUX report).

The data is used to create the Core Web Vitals technology report which can be sliced and diced to measure the mobile and desktop performances for a wide variety of content management systems in any combination, as well as provide data on JavaScript, CSS HTML and image weight data.

The data reported in the Search Engine Journal articles are based on measurements of mobile data. The scores are in the form of percentages which represent the percentages of website visits that resulted in a good Core Web Vitals (CWV) score.

This is the background on the HTTP Archive scoring for CWV:

“Core Web Vitals
There may be different approaches to measure how well a website or group of websites performs with CWV. The approach used by this dashboard is designed to most closely match the CWV assessment in PageSpeed Insights”

This is the 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 its home page, or the root page of the origin.”

Source of quotes, HTTP Archive.

Top Core Web Vitals Performance

The highest performing content management system (CMS) of the six CMS under comparison is Duda, a closed-source website builder platform that is used by agencies and developers for creating and managing large portfolios of client sites. 71% of website visits resulted in a good core web vitals score. Duda’s score is 13 percentage points ahead of the second place winner, Squarespace, another closed source website building platform.

Sites built with Duda consistently have higher CWV performance rates than any other CMS, by a wide margin. Squarespace, Drupal and Wix are bunched together with similar performance scores, with the Joomla and WordPress scoring in fifth and sixth place.

WordPress Is Faster But Other Factors Slowing It Down

Although WordPress is ranked in sixth place, it’s performance did not drop as much as the other leading content management systems, quite possibly reflecting the many performance improvements in
present in each new version of WordPress. WordPress 6.5, released in early April 2024, featured over 100 performance improvements to the backend and the front end.

The performance score for WordPress was slightly lower in April 2024 than in the beginning of the year, but less than one percentage point. However, that percentage drop is lower than the top ranked CMS, Duda, which experienced a drop of 5.41 percentage points.

Chrome Lighthouse is an automated tool for measuring website performance. The Lighthouse scores for WordPress in January of this year was 35%, which means that 35% of measured WordPress sites had a good Lighthouse CWV score. The CWV score took a dip in February and March but it zipped back to 35% in April, perhaps reflecting the many performance improvements in WordPress version 6.5.