Why do content-heavy and B2B sites tend to be slower than restaurant or retail sites?

The pattern follows page weight. A restaurant or recreation site is usually light: a few pages, some photos, a menu. Media sites carry video, ad scripts, and heavy interactive elements, and B2B or professional-services sites are more often custom-built on heavier stacks. More content and code on the page means more for a phone to load, and slower phones fall behind first.

Which Industries Have the Fastest Websites?

Q: Which industries have the fastest and slowest websites?

Restaurants and recreation sites lead at a 76% Core Web Vitals pass rate, followed by retail and government at 74%. Professional services (law, accounting, consulting) is slowest at 59%, with content/media and B2B services tied at 62%. That is a 17-point spread against a 67% all-industry baseline.

Q: Does being in a slow industry mean a website cannot pass Core Web Vitals?

No. Industry sets a rough expectation, not a ceiling. A professional-services site can absolutely pass Core Web Vitals; it just starts from a heavier average. The fix is the same in every industry: lighter pages, compressed images, and shipping real HTML instead of building the page in the browser.

Which Industries Have the Fastest Websites? A 40-Point Spread

5 min readJuly 23, 2026Updated September 22, 2026Verified against codebase

We grouped our 1.1 million-site US corpus by industry and measured real-world speed on every industry with enough Chrome traffic to register. The gap is 40 points top to bottom.

Simple local sites like recreation, restaurants, and retail lead near 75%. The heaviest industries sit at the bottom: real estate and home services near 48%, and car dealers dead last at 36%. Here is the full ranking, and why page weight, not sector, drives it.

AIndustry

Internal data research, US business web corpus

BStack

BigQuery, Chrome UX Report (CrUX), HTTP Archive

COutcome

A 40-point spread. Simple local sites like recreation, restaurants, and retail pass Core Web Vitals most often. The heaviest industries lag: real estate and home services near 48%, and car dealers last at 36%.

At a glance

Which industries actually have the fastest websites? We answered it with field data from real visitors, not opinion.

76%

Fastest industry

recreation, Core Web Vitals pass rate

36%

Slowest industry

automotive: car dealers and inventory-heavy sites

40 pts

The spread

fastest industry vs slowest

65%

All-industry baseline

pass rate across every measured site

What we measured

Core Web Vitals are Google's real-world speed and stability scores. We pulled them from the Chrome User Experience Report, which records how actual US mobile Chrome users experience a site, then grouped every measured site in our 1.1 million-site corpus by industry. A site passes when it clears all three thresholds at once. Only sites with enough real traffic to measure are included.

The ranking

Simple local sites sit at the top. The heaviest industries, car dealers and image-gallery businesses like real estate and home services, sit at the bottom, all measured against the 65% all-industry baseline.

Core Web Vitals pass rate by industry

Baseline is 65%, the pass rate across every measured US business site. Automotive (car dealers) is the outlier at 36%, a 40-point gap from the top. Source: Stackra corpus, Chrome UX Report field data (US mobile), May 2026 crawl.

Core Web Vitals pass rate by industry

Industry	CWV pass rate	Sites measured
Recreation	76%	13,123
Funeral services	74%	7,081
Restaurants	74%	58,872
Retail	73%	59,623
Religious	73%	5,446
Entertainment	72%	18,536
Nonprofits	70%	24,344
Hospitality	70%	13,508
Healthcare	70%	22,031
Wellness and beauty	70%	7,744
Government	69%	13,968
B2B services	62%	15,612
Professional services	61%	6,447
Education	61%	24,535
Content and media	59%	15,372
Financial services	56%	7,243
SaaS	55%	6,234
Real estate	48%	15,375
Home services	48%	8,081
Automotive	36%	29,836

Every US business category with at least 3,000 field-measured sites, 20 in all. Baseline 65% across all 380,369 measured sites. Source: Stackra corpus (stackra_us_corpus_corrected), Chrome UX Report field data (US mobile), frozen 2026-05 crawl, re-verified 2026-09-22.

Why the heavy industries lag

The pattern is page weight, not sector, and it upends the easy 'local means simple and fast' story. The three slowest industries are all local, physical businesses. Car dealers (36%) run inventory pages with dozens of vehicle listings, full photo galleries, and third-party dealer-platform widgets. Real estate and home services (both 48%) are heavy in the same way: listing galleries and project portfolios. At the top, the fast industries are the light ones, a restaurant menu, a rec-center schedule, a church homepage. More on the page means more for a phone to load, and the heaviest sites fall behind first, whether the business calls itself local or digital.

Platform vs speed: what 1.1M sites reveal

The deeper driver behind slow sites: whether the page ships finished HTML or builds itself in the browser.

What this means for your site

Your industry sets a rough expectation, not a ceiling. A car dealer's site can absolutely pass Core Web Vitals; plenty do. It just starts from a heavier average. The fix is the same in every industry: lighter pages, compressed images, fewer third-party widgets, and shipping real HTML instead of building the page in the browser.

Run a free Stackra audit

See how your own site's Core Web Vitals compare against real businesses in your industry.

Frequently asked questions

What are Core Web Vitals, and what does it mean for a site to 'pass' them?

Core Web Vitals are Google's three field metrics for real-world speed and stability: Largest Contentful Paint (loading speed), Cumulative Layout Shift (visual stability), and Interaction to Next Paint (responsiveness). A site passes when it clears all three thresholds at once, at the 75th percentile of its real visitors. This study used Chrome UX Report field data, not a lab simulation, so the numbers reflect what actual US mobile Chrome users experienced.

Which industries have the fastest and slowest websites?

Recreation leads at a 76% Core Web Vitals pass rate, with restaurants, retail, funeral homes, and religious sites all near 73 to 74%. Automotive (car dealers) is slowest by far at 36%, with real estate and home services at 48%. That is a 40-point spread against a 65% all-industry baseline, measured across all 20 US industries with enough field data to rank.

Why do car dealers, real estate, and home-services sites tend to be slower?

The pattern is page weight, not sector. Car-dealer sites carry inventory pages with dozens of vehicle listings, full photo galleries, and third-party dealer-platform widgets; real estate and home services are image-heavy in the same way, with listing galleries and project portfolios. A restaurant menu or a rec-center schedule is light by comparison. More content and code on the page means more for a phone to load, and the heaviest sites fall behind first, whether the business is local or digital.

Does being in a slow industry mean a website cannot pass Core Web Vitals?

No. Industry sets a rough expectation, not a ceiling. A car dealer's site can absolutely pass Core Web Vitals; plenty do. It just starts from a heavier average. The fix is the same in every industry: lighter pages, compressed images, fewer third-party widgets, and shipping real HTML instead of building the page in the browser.