Speed kills — or rather, the lack of it does. We've been tracking response times across our database of 760,000+ websites, and the correlation between site speed and pretty much every other metric we measure is impossible to ignore. Faster sites have higher trust scores, better security configurations, and more modern tech stacks. Slower sites? They tend to be the ones cutting corners everywhere else too.
I wanted to understand what actually makes fast sites fast. Not the generic "optimize your images" advice you've read a hundred times, but what our data says about the real differences between sites that respond in under 200 milliseconds and those that take two full seconds to send back a single HTML page.
Average response time improvement for sites using Cloudflare CDN vs. sites without any CDN
Cloudflare powers 22% of all websites in our database. That's a remarkable share for a single infrastructure provider. But here's what's more interesting: when we isolate the fastest 10% of sites in our dataset, Cloudflare's presence jumps to over 45%.
The math isn't complicated. A CDN puts cached copies of your site on servers around the world. When someone in Tokyo visits your site that's hosted in Virginia, they get served from a nearby node instead of waiting for packets to cross the Pacific Ocean. Physics is physics — you can't make data travel faster than the speed of light, but you can reduce the distance it needs to go.
Sites without any CDN had average response times roughly 40-60% slower than those running behind Cloudflare or similar services. That gap widens even further for visitors far from the origin server. If your audience is global and you're not using a CDN, you're making a significant portion of your visitors wait for no good reason.
We compared response times across different JavaScript frameworks and the results surprised me a bit. Here's what we found:
React sites (8% of the web) tend to be among the faster options, but with a catch. Server-side rendered React (Next.js) sites are significantly faster than client-side-only React SPAs. The initial page load for a well-configured Next.js site can be blazing fast because the HTML arrives pre-rendered. A client-side React app, though? The browser has to download, parse, and execute a JavaScript bundle before anything meaningful appears.
Vue.js sites (3% of the web) showed similar patterns. Nuxt.js (Vue's server-side framework) outperforms client-side Vue by a noticeable margin on initial load. The Vue ecosystem has gotten really good at this — Nuxt 3 in particular produces lean, fast pages.
Angular sites (2% of the web) had the heaviest average page weights in our dataset. This isn't entirely Angular's fault — it tends to be used for complex enterprise applications that are inherently feature-heavy. But the framework's default bundle size is larger than React or Vue, and that shows up in our timing data.
Framework adoption rates across 760K+ analyzed domains
jQuery is still on 40% of websites. Forty percent. In 2026. And look — jQuery was great for its time. It smoothed over browser inconsistencies that genuinely needed smoothing. But modern browsers don't have those problems anymore, and jQuery adds 30-90KB of JavaScript that most sites don't actually need.
Sites running jQuery without any other framework have median response times about 15% slower than framework-free sites that use vanilla JavaScript. Some of that is correlation rather than causation — sites still running jQuery tend to be older and less optimized in general. But the library itself does add weight to every page load, and every kilobyte counts on mobile connections.
I'm not saying jQuery is evil. I'm saying that if you're starting a new project in 2026 and you reach for jQuery, you're probably not thinking about performance.
Where your server sits physically matters. Our data shows clear patterns across the top hosting countries:
The fastest sites in our database tend to use a combination of CDN caching and strategic origin server placement. They're not relying on a single server in one location — they're distributing their content intelligently.
WordPress powers 20% of websites, and its speed reputation is... not great. But the data is more nuanced than "WordPress is slow."
WordPress sites with proper caching (WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, or Cloudflare's page caching) perform nearly as well as static sites. The CMS overhead essentially disappears when the response is being served from cache rather than generated on every request.
WordPress sites without caching, though? They're generating every page from PHP and MySQL queries on every single request. Some sites we've analyzed are making 50+ database queries per page load. That's not a speed problem — that's a configuration problem. We covered WordPress-specific security and performance in detail in our WordPress security analysis.
If you run WordPress, install a caching plugin and put Cloudflare's free tier in front of your site. These two changes alone can cut your response time by 50-70% and cost literally nothing.
Google Analytics 4 is running on 25% of all sites in our database. That's interesting for speed analysis because GA4 is itself a performance consideration — it adds JavaScript to every page. But sites running GA4 are also the ones most likely to be actively monitoring their performance metrics.
GA4 sites in our dataset have average trust scores of 67, compared to 63 overall. They're faster on average too. Not because GA4 makes them faster — obviously it adds a small overhead — but because the kind of site owner who sets up analytics is also the kind who cares about performance, security, and user experience.
There's a lesson in that. Speed isn't just a technical problem. It's a mindset problem. Sites that are fast tend to be fast because someone is paying attention. Sites that are slow tend to be slow because nobody is.
Bootstrap is on 11% of sites. It's a CSS framework that makes responsive design easier, and it's been around forever. From a speed perspective, the full Bootstrap library adds about 150-200KB of CSS and JavaScript. That's not nothing.
Modern alternatives like Tailwind CSS (which only includes the classes you actually use) produce much smaller CSS bundles. We're seeing a gradual shift in our data — newer sites are less likely to use Bootstrap and more likely to use utility-first frameworks or custom CSS.
If you're using Bootstrap, make sure you're only loading the components you need. The modular builds can cut the payload significantly. And if you're starting fresh? Consider whether you really need a full CSS framework at all. Modern CSS has gotten incredibly powerful on its own — flexbox, grid, container queries, and custom properties cover most of what Bootstrap was originally designed to provide.
Here's something we didn't expect to find: sites with better security configurations also tend to be faster. Sites with all major security headers (CSP, HSTS, X-Frame-Options) present have average response times about 25% faster than sites missing all of them.
This isn't because security headers make your site faster. It's because sites that have proper security headers are more likely to be well-maintained overall. They're using CDNs, they're optimizing their code, they're running modern software. Security and speed aren't really separate concerns — they're both symptoms of how much attention a site gets.
Want to see how your site compares? Our guide to spotting website red flags covers the visible signs of a well-maintained vs. neglected site, and many of those same signals correlate with speed.
We isolated the top 1% fastest sites in our database and looked for common characteristics. Here's what they share:
Number six is worth emphasizing. Every third-party script you add is another DNS lookup, another TLS handshake, another render-blocking resource. The fastest sites are ruthlessly selective about what external code they allow on their pages.
Run your domain through Bitverzo's free analysis and you'll see your site's technology stack, CDN status, and infrastructure details alongside your trust score. It won't give you Core Web Vitals (use Google's PageSpeed Insights for that), but it will show you the foundational choices — hosting, CDN, framework, security — that determine your speed ceiling.
If your trust score is below 60 and your site feels slow, the two problems probably have the same root cause: not enough attention to the basics. Fix one and you'll likely fix the other.
See what technologies, CDN, and infrastructure your site uses — and how it compares to the fastest sites on the web.
Check Your Site Free →The fastest websites in our 760K+ domain database overwhelmingly use CDNs like Cloudflare (22% overall, but much higher among top performers), lightweight frameworks like React or Vue with server-side rendering, and are hosted in countries with strong internet infrastructure like Germany, the Netherlands, and Canada.
Yes, significantly. In our analysis, sites using Cloudflare or similar CDNs had response times averaging 40-60% faster than sites without CDN protection. CDNs cache your content on servers worldwide, so visitors get served from the nearest location rather than your origin server.
On average, yes — but configuration matters enormously. WordPress sites with proper caching and a CDN can match sites built on modern frameworks. The problem is that many WordPress sites run 20+ plugins without caching, which kills performance. A well-optimized WordPress site with WP Rocket and Cloudflare performs perfectly well.
Data in this article is based on Bitverzo's analysis of 760,000+ domains as of July 2026. Response time measurements are taken from our scanning infrastructure and represent server response time, not full page load time. View technology trends or see the top-rated websites.