The Core Web Vitals Technology Report shows the top-ranked content management systems by Core Web Vitals (CWV) for the month of June (July’s statistics aren’t out yet). The breakout star this year is an e-commerce platform, which is notable because shopping sites generally have poor performance due to the heavy JavaScript and image loads necessary to provide shopping features.
This comparison also looks at the Interaction to Next Paint (INP) scores because they don’t mirror the CWV scores. INP measures how quickly a website responds visually after a user interacts with it. The phrase “next paint” refers to the moment the browser visually updates the page in response to a user’s interaction.
A poor INP score can mean that users will be frustrated with the site because it’s perceived as unresponsive. A good INP score correlates with a better user experience because of how quickly the website performs.
Core Web Vitals Technology Report
The HTTP Archive Technology Report combines two public datasets:
Chrome UX Report (CrUX)
HTTP Archive
1. Chrome UX Report (CrUX) CrUX obtains its data from Chrome users who opt into providing usage statistics reporting as they browse over 8 million websites. This data includes performance on Core Web Vitals metrics and is aggregated into monthly datasets.
2. HTTP Archive HTTP Archive obtains its data from lab tests by tools like WebPageTest and Lighthouse that analyze how pages are built and whether they follow performance best practices. Together, these datasets show how websites perform and what technologies they use.
The CWV Technology Report combines data from HTTP Archive (which tracks websites through lab-based crawling and testing) and CrUX (which collects real-user performance data from Chrome users), and that’s where the Core Web Vitals performance data of content management systems comes from.
#1 Ranked Core Web Vitals (CWV) Performer
The top-performing content management system is Duda. A remarkable 83.63% of websites on the Duda platform received a good CWV score. Duda has consistently ranked #1, and this month continues that trend.
For Interaction to Next Paint scores, Duda ranks in the second position.
#2 Ranked CWV CMS: Shopify
The next position is occupied by Shopify. 75.22% of Shopify websites received a good CWV score.
This is extraordinary because shopping sites are typically burdened with excessive JavaScript to power features like product filters, sliders, image effects, and other tools that shoppers rely on to make their choices. Shopify, however, appears to have largely solved those issues and is outperforming other platforms, like Wix and WordPress.
In terms of INP, Shopify is ranked #3, at the upper end of the rankings.
#3 Ranked CMS For CWV: Wix
Wix comes in third place, just behind Shopify. 70.76% of Wix websites received a good CWV score. In terms of INP scores, 86.82% of Wix sites received a good INP score. That puts them in fourth place for INP.
#4 Ranked CMS: Squarespace
67.66% of Squarespace sites had a good CWV score, putting them in fourth place for CWV, just a few percentage points behind the No. 3 ranked Wix.
That said, Squarespace ranks No. 1 for INP, with a total of 95.85% of Squarespace sites achieving a good INP score. That’s a big deal because INP is a strong indicator of a good user experience.
#5 Ranked CMS: Drupal
59.07% of sites on the Drupal platform had a good CWV score. That’s more than half of sites, considerably lower than Duda’s 83.63% score but higher than WordPress’s score.
But when it comes to the INP score, Drupal ranks last, with only 85.5% of sites scoring a good INP score.
#6 Ranked CMS: WordPress
Only 43.44% of WordPress sites had a good CWV score. That’s over fifteen percentage points lower than fifth-ranked Drupal. So WordPress isn’t just last in terms of CWV performance; it’s last by a wide margin.
WordPress performance hasn’t been getting better this year either. It started 2025 at 42.58%, then went up a few points in April to 44.93%, then fell back to 43.44%, finishing June at less than one percentage point higher than where it started the year.
WordPress is in fifth place for INP scores, with 85.89% of WordPress sites achieving a good INP score, just 0.39 points above Drupal, which is in last place.
But that’s not the whole story about the WordPress INP scores. WordPress started the year with a score of 86.05% and ended June with a slightly lower score.
INP Rankings By CMS
Here are the rankings for INP, with the percentage of sites exhibiting a good INP score next to the CMS name:
Squarespace 95.85%
Duda 93.35%
Shopify 89.07%
Wix 86.82%
WordPress 85.89%
Drupal 85.5%
As you can see, positions 3–6 are all bunched together in the eighty percent range, with only a 3.57 percentage point difference between the last-placed Drupal and the third-ranked Shopify. So, clearly, all the content management systems deserve a trophy for INP scores. Those are decent scores, especially for Shopify, which earned a second-place ranking for CWV and third place for INP.
Takeaways
Duda Is #1 Duda leads in Core Web Vitals (CWV) performance, with 83.63% of sites scoring well, maintaining its top position.
Shopify Is A Strong Performer Shopify ranks #2 for CWV, a surprising performance given the complexity of e-commerce platforms, and scores well for INP.
Squarespace #1 For User Experience Squarespace ranks #1 for INP, with 95.85% of its sites showing good responsiveness, indicating an excellent user experience.
WordPress Performance Scores Are Stagnant WordPress lags far behind, with only 43.44% of sites passing CWV and no signs of positive momentum.
Drupal Also Lags Drupal ranks last in INP and fifth in CWV, with over half its sites passing but still underperforming against most competitors.
INP Scores Are Generally High Across All CMSs Overall INP scores are close among the bottom four platforms, suggesting that INP scores are relatively high across all content management systems.
Find the Looker Studio rankings for here (must be logged into a Google account to view).
WordPress and Squarespace both provide tools to create professional, visually appealing websites suited to ecommerce, article publishing, and corporate and non-profit needs.
What should you consider when choosing between them? Let’s identify the key differences between these platforms to help you determine which one best fits your goals.
Here are seven factors to consider when choosing between WordPress and Squarespace for building a professional website:
Evaluation of WordPress and Squarespace for non-coders.
Comparison of design options between both platforms.
SEO features.
Real-world website performance comparison.
Support for blogging and article publishing.
Suitability for ecommerce and business websites.
Limitations and strengths of WordPress and Squarespace.
Functionality
Key Features
Squarespace
WordPress
SEO Features
Easy to use integrated SEO tools and functionality; good for small businesses and individuals.
Advanced SEO options via plugins; greater flexibility for complex websites.
Performance
Strong Core Web Vitals performance.
Performance is entirely up to users. Plugins and themes can degrade performance.
Customization
Templates are user-friendly for beginners. It can be customized with custom code.
Virtually unlimited customization via plugins, themes, and code modifications.
Usability
Key Features
Squarespace
WordPress
Ease of Use
Simple drag-and-drop interface; ideal for non-coders.
Requires learning individual themes, plugins, and hosting.
WordPress is designed to be easy to install and set up a basic website.
Its “Decisions, not options” software design philosophy means that users are not required to choose technical options and configurations. All features within the core WordPress installation must be useful to at least 80% of users.
WordPress sites can be designed using the native Gutenberg blocks system, which allows non-coders to create websites from scratch without any coding knowledge.
Users can select from pre-made block patterns (page layouts) to create their website designs. It sounds simple, but a user needs to “read the manual” to understand how to navigate to the different parts of their WordPress installation to make all that happen.
Some web hosts integrate a step-by-step page-building experience that makes building a website as easy as answering questions.
Squarespace is a point-and-click solution for creating a website with zero coding knowledge.
The advantage of Squarespace is that it’s “out of the box” and easy to make a website without having to research plugins or web hosts.
Squarespace offers templates that serve as starting points for creating a website and a Build With AI feature that helps users customize their site.
Creating a WordPress website from scratch with zero coding knowledge takes a minimal amount of research about plugins, themes, and web hosting.
The benefit is full ownership of the developed website and control over the associated costs.
But if all you want to do is create a professional website and get going, then Squarespace is an obvious choice.
Both WordPress and Squarespace excel as platforms for creating professional websites.
Squarespace offers non-coders options for easily creating websites. Customers who require a more unique web presence can hire Squarespace experts – independent design professionals vetted by Squarespace – who can apply custom code and extend what is possible with the templates alone.
WordPress offers thousands of templates, plugins, and themes that publishers at all skill levels can use to create literally any kind of website. The design options offered through the WordPress ecosystem are unparalleled by any other platform.
Squarespace provides tools and templates for easy customization to beginners with no coding abilities. Users with advanced needs can choose vetted Squarespace experts for custom coding or customize it themselves.
WordPress provides a vast ecosystem of plugins, themes, and templates, supporting users at all skill levels to create any type of website with virtually unlimited design options.
For example, there are website builders like Elementor that provide a drag-and-drop site creation interface where page elements are simply placed on a page.
Other page builders like Blocksy make it easy to design high-performance websites using WordPress’s native Gutenberg block design system.
SEO Features
WordPress contains all the fundamentals of optimization for search engines without the need for SEO plugins in its original configuration.
It ships with the ability to make XML sitemaps, configure title tags and meta descriptions, generate clean URLs with permalinks, and rewrite URLs automatically when they change.
Its SEO functionality can be extended with plugins that automate technical tasks that make the site more easily discoverable and crawled.
For example, SEO plugins add Bing’s IndexNow technology, add structured data, embed Google Search Console data with the admin panel, add local search optimizations, image optimization, keyword tracking, and more.
Squarespace offers similar SEO functionalities that are integrated with every website.
If there’s a difference between WordPress and Squarespace, it’s that Squarespace offers virtually everything necessary to handle SEO within one unified interface.
Whereas in WordPress, SEO can be split between what’s in the core, built into a theme, provided by an SEO, and plugins.
Squarespace is an SEO winner because of its ease of use and simple implementation.
It offers a unified and organized approach to SEO that’s helpful for small businesses and individuals with limited coding experience. It’s also useful for agencies that manage clients on Squarespace.
WordPress offers more choices and greater freedom to extend a site and is capable of optimizing the most complex web presences.
How Each Platform Handles Structured Data
Lastly, adding Schema.org structured data to webpages makes them eligible for rich results in Google, which prominently highlight websites and draw extra attention to ranked pages.
WordPress doesn’t natively support Schema.org structured data within the core CMS installation. However, it is widely available through third parties as a standalone plugin and a feature of SEO plugins.
Most publishers who are concerned about SEO will install an SEO plugin and benefit from the built-in Schema.org structured data support.
According to the HTTPArchive Web Almanac, 41% of websites now use JSON-LD structured data, and 60% of pages use RDFa and Open Graph.
That relatively low usage percentage falls short of the 80% usage threshold required for WordPress to add a feature, which may explain why Schema.org structured data is not a built-in CMS feature.
Squarespace generates six kinds of structured data:
Blog post.
Event.
Local business.
Organization.
Product.
Website.
While the above structured data cannot be edited or removed, any other structured data not provided can also be manually inserted by page or on a sitewide basis if applicable. For example, recipe bloggers can manually add Recipe structured data.
Squarespace users with more complex needs can take advantage of the ability to leverage “coding blocks” to directly add HTML to the webpage.
Structured data deployment on WordPress is more flexible and comprehensive than Squarespace, and it has significantly more SEO options because of third-party plugins and themes.
Website Performance
Website performance influences the user experience, which, in time, can result in signals of satisfaction, helpfulness, and popularity that search engines look for as part of their ranking algorithms.
The WordPress CMS core is coded to high-performance standards and improves with virtually every new version release.
The WordPress Core Performance Team monitors and works with different developer teams to ensure that best practices are followed, resulting in faster-performing websites.
While the WordPress core is fast and high-performing, advertising scripts, tracking apps, and third-party themes and plugins can degrade core web vital scores.
Squarespace is a closed platform with code that is tightly controlled, more so than WordPress.
As a consequence, a higher percentage of sites created with Squarespace tend to have good core web vitals scores than sites created with WordPress, according to real-world data collected by HTTPArchive through the Chrome User Experience.
Squarespace, however, takes the crown when it comes to website performance for both global and USA-based origins.
The latest real-world data from HTTPArchive data shows that globally, 42% of WordPress sites had good core web vitals compared to 60% of Squarespace sites with good CWV scores.
The performance data for websites based in the United States shows WordPress scores rise to 57% of sites with good CWV, while 77% of Squarespace sites scored passing marks.
Screenshot of CWV Scores WordPress Vs. Squarespace from HTTPArchive, November 2024
While WordPress has more SEO options, Squarespace is the clear winner in terms of website speed metrics, as measured by core web vitals.
What’s Best For Blogging And Article Publishing
Blogging and publishing articles on Squarespace is simple.
Squarespace supports adding videos, images, galleries, and custom code within articles. Social sharing, post scheduling, article excerpt summaries, tags, and categories are fully built-in, no special configuration is necessary.
Publishing articles is a core functionality of WordPress. Millions of websites worldwide have successfully used it for blogging and article publishing.
Third-party themes and plugins extend WordPress with seemingly limitless options. While options specialized to recipe, news, or travel-related sites are not built-in to WordPress, the available options far exceed what’s available on Squarespace.
User Opinions About WordPress
I asked Adam J. Humphreys, a WordPress developer and search marketer, about his opinion of WordPress as a platform for ecommerce sites.
Adam shared:
“Yes, it’s easy to create an online store presence with WordPress. You can deploy WordPress instantly from most hosts in a few minutes with no technical knowhow. Some web hosts offer WooCommerce pre-built, enabling users to launch prebuilt stores seamlessly.
Third-party website builders greatly improve the ability to launch an online store. Blocksy Pro allows you to build custom polished ecommerce sites quickly using WooCommerce. Astra has prebuilt designs for those who don’t have the technical know how.
I prefer Blocksy Pro because custom and intentional design specific to your online customers always converts best. When you use prebuilt templates you spend as much time removing what you don’t want as you would to just do it quickly from scratch.
Fortunately, these systems like Blocksy Pro come with simple sections and easily connect with popular website builders like Elementor.
Using a managed WordPress host is useful because they supply critical updates automatically, which helps keep ecommerce stores secure and running trouble-free.
That said, there are some WordPress themes and website builders create complex code that results in slower performance, reduced sales from a poor user experience, and often lower rankings.”
User Opinions About Squarespace
A recent discussion on Reddit highlighted five reasons why many people, including web developers, prefer WordPress over Squarespace:
Requires no maintenance effort.
Launching a website is fast and effortless.
All-in-one cost is economical.
More secure than WordPress.
Squarespace is scalable (to a point).
These are the opinions of actual Squarespace users and Redditors in the discussion:
“I know both platforms. Squarespace is the Apple of website builders. WordPress is the PC. WordPress has more powerful abilities with plugins, but maintaining the updates and security is nerd-level and a constant treadmill of tasks. Squarespace ‘just works’ – with limitations on what you can do.”
“I think if you’re not prepared to manage or pay for someone to manage WordPress then having an all in one solution like Squarespace is a good way to go. It’s very hands off as they take care of all the security in the back end. There are extensions you can add for certain things but not needed to keep your website going.”
“I recently built my own website, and chose Squarespace so that I could get it done quickly and launched. The cost is very low, and I can get things done quickly and easily. I integrated my website with Google Analytics and GTM in 30 minutes.”
“I dropped WordPress for the same reason – various plugins kept getting hacked. I’ve really enjoyed Squarespace and it’s been easy to use.”
“Unpopular opinion here, Squarespace IS scalable. I spent 10 years building on WP and refuse to work with it anymore. Consists of nothing but nightmares lol. And I’m a web developer.”
While Squarespace can scale to handle high traffic, sites requiring complex functionality, such as server-side scripting, should consider alternatives like WordPress.
Squarespace wins on ease of use for blogging and article publishing, while WordPress scores higher for customization for every kind of site.
Ecommerce Solution
Squarespace is not just a website platform; it’s also an ecommerce platform specifically designed to make it easy to set up and run an online store.
Squarespace makes it easy to design an ecommerce website with a shopping cart and checkout. It also includes the ability to allow customers to leave reviews.
Shipping options, tax payment calculations, easy checkout options for customers, and order management are all handled within a unified Squarespace user interface.
As with everything else about WordPress, flexibility and the availability of third-party plugins and themes can both simplify creating an online shopping store and scale with a more complex ecommerce store.
Both platforms deliver a professional ecommerce experience, and both can be easily deployed, with a slight edge toward simplicity going to Squarespace because everything is integrated into one interface.
However, deploying a WordPress ecommerce store with a managed WordPress host simplifies the process of getting an online store up and running. The best part is that the WordPress platform enables it to be ready to grow with the business.
Final Takeaway: Limitations And Strengths Of WordPress And Squarespace
Squarespace is appealing because it’s an easy-to-use platform for creating websites that can also be extended with custom code.
It’s suitable for a wide range of sites that publish articles or sell services and products. Its templates can be extensively modified with custom CSS. Plus, the Squarespace Blueprint AI allows for the creation of unique professional websites.
A weakness of closed-source solutions is that they aren’t as flexible and customizable as websites built on the WordPress platform.
The convenience of Squarespace comes with a cost that can’t be mitigated by switching to a different web host. It’s a compromise between cost and convenience.
Meanwhile, WordPress isn’t generally as easy or convenient as Squarespace.
Getting the best experience with WordPress takes research to choose the right web hosting platform and the best and most trustworthy template and plugins that serve your needs.
Some web hosts make it easier to get online with WordPress, and page builders greatly improve the ease of creating beautiful websites.
Both platforms are top choices for building an online presence.
Choosing which one is the best depends on how much time you’re willing to put into researching options and how important flexibility and controlling costs are.
Squarespace is an excellent choice for those who want to focus on their business without worrying about technology or site security.
WordPress is a perfect solution for those who enjoy the freedom, scalability, and cost efficiency that comes with using an open-source solution.
The HTTP Archive published its report on the state of accessibility on the web, based on scores generated with the Lighthouse Accessibility Audit, a feature of Google’s Lighthouse website auditing tool that also measures website performance, best practices, and SEO. The report compared traditional content management systems with website building platforms, with WordPress scoring surprisingly well.
Lighthouse is a feature available through Chrome DevTools built into every Chrome-based browser and as one of the audits on the standalone PageSpeed Insights tool.
HTTP Archive
The research was conducted by the HTTP Archive, a community driven open source project that tracks data about how how sites are built and perform. They offer a configurable report of how different content management platforms perform that is updated monthly.
The accessibility report was done using data collected by the The WebAim Million study which is based on the top one million website home pages. WebAim Million uses data from the Tranco list which itself is based on six different sources to come up with the list of million sites, a list that is designed to be resistant to manipulation.
“Researchers in web security or Internet measurements often use rankings of popular websites. However, in our paper we showed that these rankings disagree on which domains are most popular, can change significantly on a daily basis and can be manipulated (by malicious actors).
As the research community still benefits from regularly updated lists of popular domains, we provide Tranco, a ranking that improves upon the shortcomings of current lists. We also emphasize the reproducibility of these rankings and the studies using them by providing permanent citable references.
We currently use the lists from five providers: Cisco Umbrella (available free of charge), and Majestic (available under a CC BY 3.0 license), Farsight (only for the default list), the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) (available under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license), and Cloudflare Radar (available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license). Tranco is not affiliated with any of these providers.”
Top CMS Accessibility Performance
HTTP Archive performed it’s research to identify the best performing platforms and shortcomings of each.
Accessibility: Traditional CMS
Adobe Experience Manager and Contentful were the top traditional content management systems when it came to accessibility, tied with a score of 87%, followed by Sitecore and WordPress in second place. An interesting fact about the top ranked CMSs is that, except for WordPress, three of the four top ranked CMSs were closed source, Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), Contentful and Sitecore .
Accessibility Scores By CMS:
Adobe Experience Manager 87%
Contentful 87%
Sitecore 85%
WordPress 85%
Craft CMS 84%
Contao 84%
Drupal 84%
Liferay 83%
TYPO3 CMS 83%
DNN 82%
What’s going on with the CMS scores? HTTP Archive explains:
“When most folks think about CMS, they think about the ones that you can download and install yourself. This is predominantly made up of open source tools, but not exclusively. Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), Contentful and Sitecore were the most accessible three in this list of top 10. A possible explanation for this is that closed-source software like AEM is more likely to be used by larger corporations, which have more resources to address accessibility issues. Additionally, open-source software gives website owners a lot of freedom, which in some cases can lead to worse accessibility.”
Accessibility: Website Platforms
This comparison is by website building platform, comparing platforms like Wix, Duda, and Squarespace. The accessibility scores for the platforms were higher than the scores for traditional CMSs, reflecting how private platforms are better able to control variables as opposed to an open source CMS that offers users a more open ended experience.
Accessibility Scores By Website Platform
Wix 94%
Squarespace 92%
Google Sites 90%
Duda 87%
Hubspot CMS Hub 87%
Pixnet 87%
Weebly 86%
GoDaddy Website Builder 85%
Webnode 84%
Tilda 83%
Wix Beats Out All CMS & Platforms
What’s notable about these scores is that sites built with Wix score higher for accessibility than all other sites built on any other CMS or website building platform. Ninety four percent of sites built with Wix have a That’s a reflection of Wix’s well-known effort to create a product that is strong in performance, SEO and accessibility.
Here is the list arranged in descending order by percentage:
SEOs are understandably motivated by best practices for ranking better. For example, many didn’t prioritize site performance until it became a ranking factor, even though website performance improves sales and advertising performance and may have indirect impact on rankings.
Accessibility also has indirect advantages for improved search performance. For example, about .5% of the female population and 8% of males are color blind. Why would anyone who cares about their rankings alienate, frustrate and exclude approximately 4.5% of website visitors?
Wix and Squarespace are prioritizing accessibility. Everyone else should as well, because it’s both ethical and a sound business practice.
Squarespace announced updates to their Blueprint AI, automating website creation, and enhancing their tool suite—further strengthening their website building platform for small and medium-sized businesses.
Squarespace
Squarespace is known for their easy to use drag and drop interface that allows user to select a template, modify it with a few clicks and to drag and drop web page elements in order to create a professional looking website. Over 2% of all websites are reported to use Squarespace, showing that it’s a popular choice website building platform for small to medium size businesses.
Blueprint AI
Blueprint AI, launched in late 2023, is Squarespace’s proprietary AI website builder that helps users create a website by answering questions related to what kind of site they’re trying to create. The AI then creates a template based on the answers to the questions. Users can then use Squarespace’s full suite of editing features to further modify their website then modify to suit their needs and create a true custom website.
Other Improvements
Squarespace also announced other improvements that help users switch web page layouts and apply changes, a one-click style changer that instantly creates new style combinations, and a new hub for managing the website brand identify.
The announcement explained:
“Layout Switcher: An adaptive layout menu that enables faster website design experimentation—offering a set of flexible compositions with one’s content automatically embedded, then applied instantly to a page.
Site Themes: One-click styling combinations that make it easier to preview and apply a new website aesthetic—via handpicked font pairings, color palettes, button styles and more, with recommendations aligned to a customer’s brand personality.
Brand Identity Management: A central hub for crafting and storing one’s unique brand identity that guides Squarespace’s AI writer to instantly generate first draft, on-brand copy populated across key surface areas, including website text, content descriptions, and client documents, among others.”
Takeaways
Squarespace has about 20 years experience helping businesses easily build websites and start doing business online. This announcement shows that Squarespace continues to improve the already excellent platform that gives businesses the chance to effectively compete online.
