FastPixel Leading The HTTP Archive Core Web Vitals Report

The HTTP Archive Core Web Vitals Technology Report delivers a detailed look at how WordPress performance plugins perform across millions of real-world sites.

It’s one thing to optimize a controlled demo environment. It’s another to prove reliability at scale. This report leans entirely on real origin data collected and focuses on mobile users, a group that reflects most global traffic today.

The comparison includes six major optimization plugins, including FastPixel, WP Rocket, Litespeed Cache, NitroPack, FlyingPress, and W3 Total Cache. All of them are widely used and often recommended, but the report makes the differences between them impossible to ignore.

FastPixel doesn’t just hold its own in this lineup. It leads in several key performance categories that directly affect user experience and search visibility.

A look at the Core Web Vitals breakdown

Overall CWV performance

This is the metric that bundles LCP, CLS, and INP into a single signal, the closest thing we have to a universal score.

FastPixel reaches 60 percent good CWV, the highest in the group.

Most competitors remain in the mid to high fifties, while WP Rocket and Litespeed fall below fifty percent. When a plugin consistently helps more than half of its sites pass all three Core Web Vitals, that’s a strong indicator of stability and safe defaults rather than one-off wins.

LCP (Largest Contentful Paint)

FastPixel records mid-seventies good LCP, positioning it strongly against the other plugins. This is notable because FastPixel does not rely on the kind of heavy engineering tricks that sometimes break layouts or add maintenance overhead for site owners.

INP (Interaction to Next Paint)

Interaction responsiveness has become the spotlight metric ever since INP replaced FID as a Core Web Vitals requirement. Sites can no longer rely on fast initial loads alone. They must remain responsive throughout the user’s session.

FastPixel reaches 86 percent good INP, sitting at the top of the group together with W3 Total Cache and NitroPack. WP Rocket and FlyingPress follow just behind, while Litespeed trails just a bit lower.

CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift)

The CLS trend is remarkably tight across all plugins, demonstrating that all major optimization tools are effective at ensuring page stability.

FastPixel maintains a slight, but notable, edge with 85% good CLS. This high score, combined with the general stability of its graph, strongly suggests the plugin is not introducing layout shifts, which translates into a visually steady page and a significantly smoother user experience for visitors.

Lighthouse scores offer more clues

Lighthouse isn’t the whole story, but it’s a useful way to validate frontend performance patterns. In the report, FastPixel sits among the upper tier. It avoids the volatility shown in some competitors, where scores jump depending on the site’s theme or plugin stack.

This balance matters. A plugin that pushes for artificially high Lighthouse scores often depends on fragile transformations. Meanwhile, real visitors experience worse performance because the site becomes harder for browsers to parse efficiently. FastPixel’s steadier median score suggests a more measured approach built around reducing bottlenecks rather than masking them.

Page weight and JavaScript footprint

FastPixel holds a clear lead here. While most plugins sit around two megabytes or creep upward over time, FastPixel stays comfortably under one meg and remains far more stable.

WP Rocket, LiteSpeed Cache and FlyingPress follow in a similar two-meg range with modest fluctuations, and W3 Total Cache continues its upward climb. NitroPack stays lighter but trends upward as well.

The JavaScript story is similar. Most plugins add a predictable amount of script overhead, but the differences matter. FastPixel again sits at the bottom, keeping JS weight well under the others. WP Rocket and LiteSpeed stay mid-pack. NitroPack trends upward but remains moderate. W3 Total Cache and FlyingPress show the biggest rise over time, landing at the top of the chart.

FastPixel’s lean footprint translates into:

• smoother scrolling and interaction
• faster load times on low powered devices
• fewer CPU spikes
• better long term Lighthouse stability

Real web data vs. marketing

One of the strengths of the HTTP Archive report is that it reflects reality at scale.

This isn’t small sample testing or controlled benchmarking. It’s the combined output of websites using each plugin across every kind of hosting environment, theme, and traffic pattern.

Even though FastPixel is still the newest tool in the lineup and runs on a much smaller share of sites compared to the older, widely-installed plugins, its numbers stand out. The fact that it tops key categories, especially CWV pass rate, INP, JavaScript weight, and CLS stability, offers strong evidence that its approach works consistently, not just in ideal conditions.

Other plugins have their strengths, but many rely on rewriting HTML, injecting placeholders, or applying broad transformations that vary in reliability from site to site. FastPixel takes a more modern, more focused path: image optimization, CDN edge delivery, and minimal overhead.

The data speaks pretty clearly. That strategy pays off.