Revealed: Which CMS Is Best For SEO in 2024? Part 1: Speed

How fast (or slow) was each CMS?

Speed matters for rankings.

It’s one of the few signals that Google has confirmed influences rankings.

We measured the performance of each of our test sites using Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

Here’s a summary of the results…

It’s not even close.

The self-hosted sites (Joomla and WordPress) significantly outperformed the sites built with platform-hosted CMS systems.

Our WordPress test site was fastest overall. But Joomla ran it close. Both CMS systems were super quick out-the-box and passed Google’s Core Web Vitals (CWV) tests with flying colors.

Squarespace, Wix, and GoDaddy on the other hand all suffered speed issues and our test sites would be likely to fail CWV (even though the performance of real-world websites improved significantly for all three CMS compared to a few years ago).

So what was slowing our test sites down?

Well, while they all had their own little quirks (you can read the individual reviews for more detail), there was a common denominator:

Blanket loading of scripts and styles.

Don’t need the script for that fancy homepage carousel? Tough.

You’re getting it on every page of your site regardless.

Although this seems to have gotten better over the years, the core of the platform-hosted CMS systems is still pretty heavy and bloated, and there’s no simple way to turn things on and off.