First Contentful Paint of the top 500 most popular websites
Your website's performance can make or break your business. Faster loading times directly impact user engagement and conversion rates, making it essential for any tech leader aiming for success.
What First Contentful Paint measures
First Contentful Paint (FCP) is a performance metric that measures the time from navigation to the time when the browser renders the first bit of content that is interesting to the user. It is an important metric for user experience and SEO. According to Google's web.dev thresholds, the ideal FCP value is less than 1.8 seconds. Websites that have FCP values higher than 3 seconds are considered to have poor performance.
How I measured it
The list is the Moz Top 500. Each site was loaded in Chrome 126.0.6478.126 on Ubuntu 22.04 on 18 July 2024, and FCP was read from the browser over the Chrome DevTools Protocol. 487 of the 500 sites returned a measurement in this run; the rest did not. Earlier headless runs in Chrome 122 and 126 exist as well, but the histogram, the summary table, the notebook and the list of slow sites below all come from this one run, so they can be read against each other.
The distribution across 500 sites
Below is a histogram of FCP values for top 500 most popular websites from moz.com. The data was collected using a web automation script that controlled and monitored web browser via Chrome DevTools Protocol.
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| Measure | Value |
|---|---|
| Sites with a measurement | 487 of 500 |
| Median FCP | 0.56 s |
| 90th percentile | 1.53 s |
| Slowest site | 6.00 s |
| Over 1.8 s (needs improvement) | 35 |
| Over 3 s (poor) | 13 |
As you can see, the FCP values vary significantly. The median FCP is around 0.5 seconds, but there are websites with FCP values exceeding 5 seconds. Vast majority of sites has FCP below 1.8s as recommended by Google. What about websites, which have FCP over 1.8s? Some of them may just use client-side rendering with fetch requests to servers that are far away from geolocation where tests were run. The list of websites with FCP over 1.8s is presented in the embedded Python notebook below.
Which sites are over the line
As you can see, the list of websites with FCP over 1.8s is quite long. If I discard the websites which probably have distant servers, I am left with pretty interesting results:
- https://www.over-blog.com
- https://outlook.com
- https://wiley.com
- https://imageshack.us
- https://amzn.to
- https://developers.google.com
- https://brandbucket.com
- https://go.co
- https://change.org
- https://namecheap.com
- https://live.com
- https://icann.org
- https://samsung.com
- https://imdb.com
- https://aliexpress.com
- https://disney.com
Yeees. You see it right. Google Developers is on this list. The site, which states that FCP should be below 1.8s for optimal user experience. I guess developers just may be a different audience, perhaps more patient?
Google Developers, measured by Google's own tool
Google has even created a web application for website diagnostics, where I confirmed the result.
The diagnostic tool include suggestions on how to improve the performance:
With all that, there remains only one thing left to say:
Google, please fix your website. It is slow!
You can always ask me for help.
Let's talk Peer to Peer