Awesome 2200 CMS Load Time Comparisons, Which is the Fastest?

I received an email from the Admin of Page Load Time at the start of this week, informing me that they had tested the Page Load Times of 2200 (honestly, they have, its amazing) websites of the following CMSs: Movable Type, WordPress, EZ Publish, PHP Nuke, Joomla, Drupal, Mambo and Plone. Elgg was also included within the tests but proved to be far too slow consistently, therefore was excluded from all final results.
Remarkable and breath taking work.

Of course the results can’t be perfect by picking random websites, but the results do give us all a good measure.

Note : Websites were selected by searching on “powered by …” in google and selecting the first 300 to 700 websites for each CMS.

Fastest Page Load by CMS

Average page load time across all 9 CMSs tested: 5.4 seconds
Top 10 percent fastest CMS sites: 0.7 seconds
Movable Type: bottom red line. Very impressive. Movable Type has a static publishing model build in. Obviously most people use that. That makes Movable Type the undisputed champion where page load times are concerned.
WordPress and Joomla do very well also.

Time to First Byte by CMS

Time To First Byte or TTFB is a measurement that is often used as an indication of the responsiveness of a web server or other network resources.
It is the duration from the virtual user making an HTTP request to the first byte of the page being received by the browser. This time is made up of the socket connection time, the time taken to send the HTTP request and the time to taken to get the first byte of the page.

Initial Connection by CMS

A good Initial Connection time is 30 ms.
Except for the around 40 websites with slower than 150 ms Initial Connection times, results are remarkably consistent.

Average Page Size by CMS

Average page size Across all 9 CMSs tested: 428 KB
Top 10 percent fastest CMS sites: 143 KB
A large number of sites have home pages sizes of over 1 MB.
Notice how the top 100 sites all have sizes less than 500 KB.

Average Number of Requests by CMS

Average Number of Requests across all 9 CMSs tested: 34.
Top 10 percent fastest CMS sites: 15.
Mustard yellow Elgg very impressive, but extremely slow web hosts make them the worst CMS in this study.

In a Nut Shell…

Hopefully, you can read and understand all of this information, it took me a couple of times of reading the full post (which you can read here: 2200 WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, … Websites Load Time Comparisons), to fully take in all the info. Basically, it is an excellent guide to help you select the best CMS for your next project.

You can read the full and detailed post here : 2200 WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, … Websites Load Time Comparisons. Thanks to Page Load Time for all there hard and detailed work.

All sites were tested here : Pagetest – Web Page Optimization and Performance Test, why not test yours.

Comments are most welcome on this subject, let me know what you think.