58% of business websites in construction and engineering run on WordPress, and they respond 2.8 times as slowly

How quickly does a business website respond?

We requested the homepage of every site the way a new visitor does: just the domain name, with nothing in memory. We measured how long it takes until the page itself has arrived, including the redirect to the secure version. Images and scripts that load afterwards don't count; in the browser it therefore takes longer.

Half of the sites had arrived within 0.5 seconds. For 1,628 sites (32.5%) it took longer than a second, for 732 sites (14.6%) longer than two seconds. On a second visit, when the connection is already there, half had arrived within 0.2 seconds.

WordPress: widely used, and noticeably heavier

We recognised WordPress by traces in the page. It is by far the most used system: 57.5% of the measured sites. Joomla 2.4%, Wix 1.4%, Drupal 1.1%, JouwWeb 0.6%; for the rest we recognised no system (custom-built, or a system that leaves no traces).

In our measurement a WordPress site loads 16 separate scripts on the homepage (median), the other sites 5. The page itself arrives after 1 seconds on a first visit, against 0.4 seconds for the rest. That fits how WordPress works: every page is built on the server from a database, with a theme and plugins that each send along their own parts. It can be faster, with caching and a lean theme, but someone has to set that up and maintain it. Hosting also plays a part; we did not measure that separately.

14.4% are missing updates

Some of the WordPress sites show in their source code which version is running: 1,824 of the 2,877. We compared that version with WordPress's own list (latest version on the day of measurement: 7.1.2). WordPress still releases fixes for security holes in older branches, so an older branch is not unsafe straight away, as long as the latest release of that branch is installed.

For 262 of those 1,824 sites (14.4%) that was not the case: a newer release with fixes exists that has not been installed. 36.3% run on an older branch than the current one.

What we did not investigate: whether sites have been hacked, and how the plugins are doing. Plugins are the most common entry point for abuse in WordPress and can't be counted reliably from outside. The actual share of sites with overdue maintenance may therefore be higher than what we could see.

And our own site?

Anyone who writes about speed should be fast themselves. So we measured modexsoftware.nl in exactly the same way: all 31 pages, each page three times. On a first visit our homepage arrives after 0.1 seconds. Half of the 5,004 measured sites took 0.5 seconds or longer, the WordPress sites 1 seconds. The slowest page of our site arrived after 0.1 seconds.

Our homepage loads 1 separate script; for the WordPress sites it was 16. In Lighthouse, Google's speed test, the site scores 99 out of 100 on a phone (median over 31 pages; the lowest page 96). What makes the difference: ordinary, ready-made pages without a database and without plugins, with all styling in the page itself.

To be fair: our site is small and new, and is hosted at Cloudflare, which stores pages close to the visitor. That helps too. The only point Lighthouse still mentions is the statistics script that Cloudflare itself adds to count visitors without cookies.

How we measured

• For each company only the homepage was requested, twice in quick succession, in October 2026, from one location in the Netherlands with an ordinary internet connection.
• “First visit” is the time until the HTML of the homepage has arrived, from typing in the domain name: looking up the name, setting up the connection and redirecting all count. It is not a measurement of the full loading time in a browser.
• We requested 5,352 sites. 182 did not respond and 166 were parked or practically empty; those don't count.
• We recognised the system by fixed traces in the page, for WordPress for example the wp-content folder. A site that hides such traces counts as “not recognised”.
• The WordPress version only counts if the site shows it itself. 1,053 WordPress sites don't; we say nothing about their version.
• The sector follows from the trade directory the company was listed in; in addition a group of member companies of Bouwend Nederland. It is not a random sample of all Dutch companies.
• Nothing was tested or tried: we only read what every visitor to the homepage gets to see.

We only publish totals and don't name companies. You may reuse the figures with attribution and a link to this page (licence CC BY 4.0). Questions about the method? Email info@modexsoftware.nl. Our earlier research was about websites that don't work on a phone.

How is your site doing?

With the free website check you see in a few seconds how fast your homepage responds and whether the technology is up to date. We build our own sites without WordPress and without plugins; what that brings you can read under SEO and AIO.