Google September 2023 Core Web Vitals Champ Report

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The most recent Core Web Vitals report published by HTTP Archive shows key improvements in performance across the biggest seven CMS platforms in 2023. Of these seven leading performers, one stands out with significantly strong CWV scores.

The good news is that all seven content management systems have increased their scores in CWV, meaning each has something to celebrate.

We benchmark the Core Web Vitals of the top seven content management systems in this post from January 2023 through July 2023, based on the most recent data available at the time of our comparison in September 2023. Statistics about the percentage of CMS platforms being used come from the W3Techs Technology Report.

Google Core Web Vitals Technology Report

The CWV report is built by HTTP Archive, sourced from the CrUX dataset, which is an aggregation of CWV scores measured in real users’ experiences in the Chrome browser.

Additional data from the HTTP Archive, such as technology detection, allows for the analysis of website-building technologies and their impact on user experiences.

A full report is compiled on different metrics every month, including but not limited to CWV, page loading speed, page weight, image optimization, and many other variables that go into making the browsing experience.

The Core Web Vitals report is scored as a percentage of users who have experienced a good CWV score. For example, a CMS Example at 40% means that 40% of users had a good CWV experience. The higher the percentage, the better the CMS is performing with regard to CWV.

Duda 73.76%

Duda holds the top position among CMS platforms in terms of Core Web Vitals performance. Throughout the year, they have consistently established the standard for Core Web Vitals performance, maintaining their exceptional scores.

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It’s crucial to emphasize that these scores are derived from real-world performance metrics, impervious to manipulation or gaming, rendering them a trustworthy gauge of performance.

Duda embarked on the year with an initial CWV ranking of 70.69% and has succeeded in enhancing their scores by an additional 3.07%, further solidifying their leading position.

Shopify 56.17%

Shopify nudged ahead of Wix, although both were neck and neck this month. Shopify is a closed-source e-commerce solution, so to see a second-place position this month was impressive, especially considering the struggles many e-commerce websites have with Core Web Vitals performance.

E-commerce sites generally face challenges in improving Core Web Vitals because of the many features, scripts, and analytics central to their operations; they tend to be some of the poorest performers.

The fact that Shopify, as an e-commerce platform, has secured second place is a notable accomplishment, showing the inherent difficulty of ensuring strong performance for e-commerce websites.

Wix 55.07%

The reigning performance leader remains at the forefront of Core Web Vital’s performance. Starting the year with a score of 49.27%, they have made impressive strides, augmenting their score by nearly 6%.

Taking a broader view, in the early days of 2022, Wix began with a score of 28.24%, and throughout this year, they have nearly doubled their Core Web Vitals scores.

Achieving a nearly 50% improvement in Core Web Vitals scores is a remarkable feat for one of the most widely used content management systems worldwide.

Drupal 51.38%

Drupal, occupying the sixth position in CMS usage, secured the fourth spot in terms of Core Web Vitals performance.

With a CWV score of 51.38%, it’s just a small margin behind the third and second-highest-ranked content management systems. What makes this score particularly noteworthy is that Drupal, similar to WordPress and Joomla, operates as a freely available open-source CMS.

It’s truly exhilarating to witness such a strong ranking for an open-source project.

Joomla 41.76%

Joomla is the fifth most popular CMS platform, and it holds the same position in CWV performance of the top seven content management systems.

While fifth place may not seem all that impressive among this selected group, Joomla actually isn’t too far off the pace from the next tier of high performers.

Joomla’s performance is, in fact, quite laudable, its score being 41.76%, for a free-of-cost open-source Content Management System.

Squarespace 39.12%

Coming fourth in the lineup of most popular CMS systems is Squarespace, nearly seven percentage points above WordPress, to end with a commendable score of 39.12%.

It started the year at 34.69%, up 4.43% for a laudable performance increase. Looking at the bigger picture, the score of 39.12% in July 2023 is almost 10% higher than the January 2022 score of 29.54%.

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Though second to the last in rank, the performance of Squarespace has shown a remarkable upward trend, with consistent and significant improvement.

WordPress 32.52%

WordPress, the most-used CMS on earth, sits on the low end of the CWV performance spectrum.

Despite its ranking at the bottom in this list of CMS, WordPress has been improving. Starting the year with 30.39%, it finished summer with 32.52%—an impressive jump of 2.13%.

These scores put it at the lower end in the comparison but are a big leap forward from its 2022 performance, which saw the beginning of the year commence with a score of 25.39%.

This is an impressive increase of 7.13% if measured from January 2022. Such a positive transformation in the performance of WordPress is because of the WordPress Performance Team, which diligently integrates best practices with every version release.

Improving the Core Web Vitals of such a popular open-source CMS is always a tough job because of the huge ecosystem of plugins and themes that operate independently of the core CMS.

While a single 2.13% may look nominal in isolation, in a broader perspective, a 7.13% advancement to that is a testament to the hard work of the WordPress Performance Team—a big deal for sure.

The Core Web Vitals Performance

The percentage indicates year-over-year improvements by all seven content management systems in the survey. The impressive, near 50% increase for Wix stands in contrast with the other CMSs examined.

WordPress—often in, or near, the bottom among these seven leading CMSs—reports steady improvement regarding performance.

This upward trajectory of scores across all seven CMS platforms from the beginning to this point in the year only demonstrates how important performance is to each content management system in this comparison.

This translates into palpable improvements for millions of publishers and online merchants because each of these improvements results in better performance in Core Web Vitals.

Would you like to read more about the Google Core Web Vitals update related articles? If so, we invite you to take a look at our other tech topics before you leave!

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