How Slow Is Too Slow? Website Speed Benchmarks

“Is my site fast?” is a question without a simple answer — it depends on the metric, your industry, your audience, and your device target. But there are useful benchmarks that can tell you whether you have a real problem.

Core Web Vitals Benchmarks

These are Google’s official thresholds, and they’re the most important benchmarks to hit:

Metric	Good	Needs improvement	Poor
LCP	< 2.5s	2.5–4.0s	> 4.0s
CLS	< 0.1	0.1–0.25	> 0.25
INP	< 200ms	200–500ms	> 500ms
FCP	< 1.8s	1.8–3.0s	> 3.0s
TTFB	< 800ms	800–1800ms	> 1800ms

These are measured at the 75th percentile in field data from CrUX — meaning 75% of your real users must hit these thresholds for your site to pass.

Lighthouse Performance Score Benchmarks

Score	Category	Typical sites
90–100	Excellent	Optimized modern sites
75–89	Good	Well-maintained sites
50–74	Fair	Typical CMS sites, some optimization done
25–49	Poor	Default WordPress, many plugins, no optimization
0–24	Very poor	Serious issues: no caching, huge images, multiple blocking scripts

Note: Lighthouse scores are lab measurements with throttled mobile conditions. Real user experience may differ. For a detailed breakdown of what counts as a good Lighthouse score, see our companion guide.

Industry Benchmarks

Performance varies significantly by industry:

E-commerce: LCP averages 3.5–4.5s (mobile). Well-optimized stores: under 2.5s. Most product pages fail Google’s LCP threshold.

News/Publishing: Variable — text content can be fast, but ad-heavy news sites often have LCP of 5–8s and high CLS from ad slots.

SaaS/Marketing sites: Typically better than e-commerce — static marketing pages can hit LCP of 1.5–2.5s.

WordPress blogs: Default installation: LCP 4–8s, Lighthouse score 20–40. Optimized: LCP 1.5–3s, score 60–85. See our WordPress speed audit guide for optimization steps.

Shopify stores: Default themes: LCP 3–5s. Optimized: 1.8–2.5s. See our Shopify speed test guide for platform-specific tips.

Total Page Weight Benchmarks

Weight	Assessment
Under 500KB	Excellent
500KB–1.5MB	Good
1.5MB–3MB	Needs optimization
Over 3MB	Problem — investigate

This is the total transferred size (after compression) for the initial page load. Heavy images and third-party scripts are the usual culprits.

Request Count Benchmarks

Count	Assessment
Under 30	Excellent
30–60	Good
60–100	Needs optimization
Over 100	Investigate — third-party scripts are likely accumulating

HTTP/2 multiplexing reduces the cost of multiple requests, but each request still has overhead.

TTFB Benchmarks

TTFB	Assessment
Under 100ms	Excellent (CDN-cached static or edge-rendered)
100–300ms	Good (cached dynamic or fast origin)
300–800ms	Acceptable (dynamic, some optimization)
800–1800ms	Needs improvement — add caching
Over 1800ms	Critical — server is too slow

Mobile vs. Desktop

Most sites perform significantly better on desktop. Google measures Core Web Vitals separately for desktop and mobile, but if your traffic is majority mobile (which it likely is — industry average is ~60% mobile), mobile performance is more important.

Lighthouse tests with a simulated Moto G4 equivalent CPU (4x throttling). Most of your real users are on similar or worse hardware.

Where Does Your Site Stand?

Run a test on debugutils.dev to get your current LCP, CLS, INP scores and see exactly which threshold you’re in. The report shows you the real field data from Google’s CrUX dataset — not just a simulated test.

Not sure where you stand? Our guide on how to tell if your website is fast walks through the full assessment process. Aim for the “Good” threshold across all three Core Web Vitals as your primary goal. Anything in the “Poor” range is affecting your Google rankings today.