Httparchive published the First Contentful Paint scores of top content management systems. It showed Wix dead last behind every CMS in the analysis for the fastest scores.
However, Wix pulled ahead of WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal in other areas.
The data reveals actionable trends.
What Is First Contentful Paint
First contentful paint (FCP) is a user experience metric. It measures how fast a webpage shows usable content to site visitors.
Drupal is the champion at showing content, according to the First Contentful Paint metric in desktop. Wix is far behind.As the graph above shows, Wix performed last out of the four content management systems under consideration.
In the full analysis of the performance of 25 content management systems, including Weebly, TYpo3 and others, Wix performed the worst.
What the graph shows is that:
- Only 7.99 percent of the Wix sites measured were able to earn a Fast ranking.
- 30.94 percent the WordPress sites measured achieved a Fast ranking.
That’s a huge performance difference between Wix and WordPress – 7.99 percent versus 30.94 percent.
Drupal again leads the pack in terms of fastest First Contentful Paint metric in mobile. Yet all the percentages able to score a rank of Fast are lower than on desktop. Wix’s score remains relatively stable at last place.Related: Wix vs WordPress: Which Is Better for SEO?
Fastest Mobile FCP Scores
Wix performance scores actually improved when tested in the mobile environment.
Of all the Wix sites measured, 9.01 percent were able to achieve a ranking of Fast on mobile.
Nevertheless, Wix is still ranked last out of a total of 290 content management systems analyzed for achieving a score of Fast.
The number of WordPress sites ranked as Fast on mobile was 19.12 percent.
More Wix Sites Rated Average
Among the top content management systems, Wix is a winner in the area of First Contentful Paint for most sites rated Average.
There were three rankings for the speed at which First Contentful Paint was achieved: Fast, Average, and Slow.
Every content management system analyzed had more sites ranking as Average than Fast or Slow.
For example, here are the percentages of WordPress sites that were ranked as Fast, Average and Slow for the amount of time it took to render First Contentful Paint in Mobile:
19.2% Fast
51.64% Average
29.24% Slow
Fast: 19.2% of WordPress sites analyzed were ranked as Fast, meaning that 19.2% of WordPress sites analyzed were fast at achieving First Contentful Paint
Average: 51.64% of WordPress sites were ranked as Average, meaning that 51.64% of WordPress sites analyzed were average at achieving First Contentful Paint, neither fast or slow.
Slow: 29.24% of WordPress sites were ranked as Slow, meaning that 29.24% of WordPress sites analyzed were slow at achieving First Contentful Paint.
The bulk of the WordPress sites were ranked Average, neither fast or slow. This is the same for Joomla, Drupal and Wix.
Judged by the speed scores (Fast, Average, Slow), Wix comes out on top for most sites achieving a speed rating of Average for First Contentful Paint:
- Percentage of Wix sites ranking Average: 59.79 percent
- Percentage of Joomla sites ranking Average: 53.23 percent
- Percentage of WordPress sites ranking Average: 51.64 percent
- Percentage of Drupal sites ranking Average: 47.07 percent
Related: Core Web Vitals: A Complete Guide
Mobile Performance Is Worse than Desktop
An issue of concern is that, aside from Wix (marginally), all the other content management systems performed less well in mobile than in desktop.
This may indicate that web publishers have not yet adjusted to designing for mobile.
Publishers may have to consider making more tradeoffs in terms of the amount of images used in mobile versions of websites and how many third-party scripts, fonts, and icons are used.
While Wix’s performance for achieving Fast scores are dead last, Wix performed better than WordPress, Joomla and Drupal in getting more sites to rank at the Average level on mobile devices.
This might sound mediocre, but considering that all CMS’s had more sites ranked average than any other label, Wix’s performance stands out.
First Contentful Paint Matters
If ad views, ad clicks or sales matter to you, then first contentful paint is an important metric to master.
Research from Google discovered that the longer a site visitor must wait the likelier they will leave a site. Site speed is critical for visitors on mobile devices.
Google’s research revealed that on-page elements (e.g., third-party scripts) was the leading cause of a slow site. The second leading cause was the number of images.
According to Google:
“For bounce rate, which measures the percentage of people that leave your mobile site without exploring beyond the first page, speed has the most impact.”
That means nobody’s going to be clicking your ads or buying from you if they’re racing to get off of your site because the content loads too slowly.
First Contentful Paint is One of Many Metrics
Do not use First Contentful Paint as a deciding factor as to which CMS you will chooose.
The ability to update a website yourself in any manner you see fit is something that is lacking in the Wix environment.
Making necessary changes on your own is important. Having to wait for a framework to update can negatively affect your search marketing.
While Wix performs admirably in this analysis, there are many other factors that should be considered concurrently.
Read the entire analysis on httparchive.org
Image Credits
Images by Shutterstock, Modified by Author
