The Fastest and Slowest Industries on the Web: A 2026 Core Web Vitals Benchmark

We measured how the leading websites in 18 industries perform for real users, then ranked those industries against each other. The yardstick is Core Web Vitals, the three field metrics Google uses to grade page experience: Largest Contentful Paint for loading, Interaction to Next Paint for responsiveness, and Cumulative Layout Shift for visual stability.

The data comes from the Chrome User Experience Report for May 2026. It reflects real Chrome users on real devices, not lab tests.

The headline result is a wide spread. On mobile, the fastest industry gets 78.9% of its leading sites past Core Web Vitals. The slowest gets 10.0%. That is a gap of roughly 69 percentage points between first place and last.

Government and public-sector sites tie with healthcare at the top on mobile (78.9%). Technology and SaaS sits last at 10.0%, with travel and hospitality just ahead at 10.5%. On desktop the order shifts and the bar is easier to clear, but the same pattern holds: content-light, transaction-focused sites pass at high rates, while media-heavy and script-heavy industries fall behind.

Across all 18 industries, an average of about 42% of leading sites pass Core Web Vitals on mobile, versus about 61% on desktop. Only 5 of the 18 industries clear half on mobile. On desktop, 12 of 18 do.

The study uses the Chrome UX Report for May 2026 (BigQuery table 202605), aggregated across all countries. CrUX records anonymized loading-experience data from real Chrome users on the most-visited origins and is updated monthly.

CrUX does not group sites by industry, so we built the industry layer ourselves. We assembled a seed list of 18 industries and mapped each to roughly 20 leading global brands, then joined that list to CrUX.

Between 17 and 20 of each industry's seed brands appear in CrUX for the month. The remainder fall below the traffic threshold that CrUX requires before it reports a site, so they are excluded from the count.

A site passes Core Web Vitals when its 75th-percentile real-user experience is good on all three metrics at the thresholds Google defines: LCP at or under 2,500 ms, INP at or under 200 ms, and CLS at or under 0.10. INP is required only where measured, matching the HTTP Archive Web Almanac convention.

Each brand is matched to its main site (apex or www host), so unrelated subdomains do not distort a category. An industry's score is the equal-weighted share of its brands that pass. Results are reported separately for mobile and desktop.

The data is field data, not a lab test. It reflects real users on real devices and networks, and it moves month to month. Every figure here is a snapshot of May 2026.

Start with the averages. The simple mean of the 18 industry pass rates is about 42% on mobile and about 61% on desktop. More than half of the leading sites we measured fail Core Web Vitals on a phone.

Mobile devices account for roughly 60% of web traffic worldwide (Statista). They also run on slower networks and less powerful processors than desktops, which is the main reason mobile trails desktop in every industry we measured.

The gap between mobile and desktop is universal. Nearly every one of the 18 industries passes at a lower rate on mobile than on desktop. The size of that penalty is itself a useful signal, and we return to it below.

The business case for closing the gap is well established. A one-second delay in load time is associated with a 7% drop in conversions (Google). Bounce rates roughly double as load time grows from one second to five seconds (Google). Portent found that a site loading in one second converts at 3.05%, while a five-second site converts at just 0.41%. Deloitte's "Milliseconds Make Millions" study found that a 100-millisecond improvement in mobile load time lifted retail conversions by roughly 1%.

Three industries separate themselves at the top of the mobile ranking.

Government and public sector: 78.9% pass on mobile, 84.2% on desktop. Public-sector sites lead the mobile field. The reason is structural. Government pages tend to be content-first, with simple templates, modest imagery, and very little of the third-party advertising and tracking that weighs down commercial sites.

The median government site shows its main content in about 1.2 seconds on mobile and responds to interaction in about 125 milliseconds, the fastest interaction figure of any industry.

Healthcare: 78.9% pass on mobile, 89.5% on desktop. Healthcare ties for first on mobile and takes outright first on desktop, where nearly nine in ten of its leading sites pass. Much of this category is reference content: symptom checkers, condition libraries, hospital and provider sites. Healthcare also posts the strongest visual stability of any industry on mobile, with 100% of its measured sites earning a good CLS score.

Real estate: 75.0% pass on mobile, 80.0% on desktop. Real estate is the surprise of the top three. Property sites carry heavy image galleries, maps, and search interfaces, yet the leading players pass at a high rate.

The median real estate site renders in about 1.7 seconds on mobile and holds a strong 95% good-CLS rate, which suggests these teams have reserved space for images and map tiles so the page does not jump around as it loads.

Two more industries clear the halfway mark on mobile. Education passes at 60.0% on mobile, helped by content-driven university and course sites, though it is the only industry that performs worse on desktop (50.0%) than on mobile.

News and media also passes at 60.0% on mobile and jumps to 85.0% on desktop, which runs against the common assumption that news sites are slow. We look at that result more closely below.

At the bottom of the mobile ranking, the numbers are stark.

Technology and SaaS: 10.0% pass on mobile, 45.0% on desktop. The industry that builds the web is last on mobile. Only one in ten leading technology and SaaS sites passes Core Web Vitals on a phone.

The cause is the very thing these companies are good at: JavaScript. Heavy single-page-application frameworks, large marketing pages, and interactive product demos push the median SaaS site to a 3.1-second mobile LCP and a 250-millisecond INP. Only 15% of these sites post a good mobile loading time, and only 40% post good interaction, the weakest scores in the study.

Travel and hospitality: 10.5% pass on mobile, 36.8% on desktop. Travel carries the heaviest combination of media and third-party scripts of any category. The median travel site takes about 3.4 seconds to show its main content on mobile and 325 milliseconds to respond to a tap, both the worst figures in the study.

Booking flows, map embeds, review widgets, and price-comparison scripts all compete for the main thread on devices that can least afford it.

Telecommunications: 15.0% pass on mobile, 35.0% on desktop. Telecom carriers post the lowest desktop pass rate of any industry at 35.0%, and a weak 15.0% on mobile. Carrier sites combine large marketing pages, account dashboards, device catalogs, and plan-comparison tools, and the result is a median mobile load of 2.9 seconds.

Just above these three sit a cluster of consumer categories that struggle on phones: entertainment and streaming (30.0%), automotive (33.3%), gaming (33.3%), and food and restaurants (33.3%). Each is held back by a different mix of heavy media, embedded players, and interactive features.

Fashion and apparel passes at 29.4% on mobile, dragged down by an interaction score where only 35.3% of sites are good, a classic symptom of script-heavy product pages and overlay-driven storefronts.

Because nearly every industry passes at a lower rate on mobile than on desktop, the size of that drop is a useful diagnostic. A small gap means a site is engineered for phones from the start. A large gap means the desktop experience was built first and the mobile experience inherited weight it cannot carry.

Some of the widest gaps appear in categories you might expect to be mobile-first. Fashion and apparel passes at 66.7% on desktop but only 29.4% on mobile, a 37-point fall. Gaming drops from 61.1% to 33.3%. Nonprofit and NGO sites fall from 73.7% to 42.1%. Automotive slides from 66.7% to 33.3%.

In each case, desktop hardware and bandwidth paper over inefficiencies that phones expose.

A few industries hold up better. Government loses only about 5 points moving from desktop to mobile (84.2% to 78.9%). Healthcare gives up about 11 points.

The practical takeaway is that desktop scores flatter most sites. A team looking at a green Core Web Vitals badge on a laptop can be one phone test away from a very different picture.

Pass rates only tell you whether a site cleared the bar. To understand why, look at the three metrics separately, because different industries fail for different reasons.

Largest Contentful Paint (loading). This is the metric most people mean when they say a site is slow. The spread is enormous. On mobile, news and media posts a 95% good-loading rate and a 1.5-second median, while technology and SaaS posts a 15% good rate and a 3.1-second median.

Government, healthcare, and real estate all sit near the top. The pattern is consistent: industries with light pages and few third-party scripts load fast, industries with heavy media or large JavaScript bundles load slowly.

Interaction to Next Paint (responsiveness). This newer metric measures the lag between a user tapping and the page responding, and it is where script-heavy industries get punished hardest. On mobile, government leads with 89.5% good, while travel and hospitality manages just 21.1% and fashion just 35.3%.

INP is largely a JavaScript problem. When the main thread is busy executing code, it cannot respond to the user. Industries built on interactive frameworks (SaaS, travel, fashion) consistently show the weakest interaction scores.

Cumulative Layout Shift (visual stability). This metric measures how much the page moves around as it loads, and it is the most common reason an otherwise-fast site still fails. Several industries post strong loading and interaction scores yet lose points here because content jumps as ads, images, and embeds arrive.

On desktop, sports sites carry a median CLS right at the 0.10 threshold. On mobile, banking and finance sites post weak visual stability, with only 66.7% earning a good CLS score. Layout shift is frequently the difference between a site that feels fast and a site that actually passes.

The combined lesson is that "make it faster" is too blunt an instruction. A SaaS site usually needs interaction work, a media site usually needs loading and stability work, and a retail site often needs all three. See our complete Core Web Vitals guide for the metric-by-metric fix list.

A few categories deserve a closer look, because the topline number hides something instructive.

News and media: faster than its reputation, on desktop. News sites are the web's traditional example of bloat, yet they pass at 85.0% on desktop and 60.0% on mobile, with a 95% good-loading rate on both. The major publishers in our sample have invested heavily in performance, and on desktop it pays off.

The mobile figure is lower mostly because of interaction and the sheer volume of advertising and tracking that loads on a phone.

Retail and e-commerce: middle of the pack, with the most to gain. Online stores pass at 45.0% on mobile and 55.0% on desktop, squarely average. That placement is significant because e-commerce is the category where speed maps most directly to revenue.

The metric breakdown shows good visual stability (85% on mobile) but weaker loading (65%) and interaction (55%), which points to heavy product pages, app and plugin scripts, and checkout flows as the culprits.

Fashion and apparel: a responsiveness problem. Fashion passes at 66.7% on desktop but collapses to 29.4% on mobile, and the reason is interaction: only 35.3% of fashion sites post a good INP on mobile. Image-rich storefronts with overlays, quick-view modals, and animation libraries put a heavy script burden on phones.

Loading is not the main issue here (58.8% of sites are good on mobile loading); the code that runs after the page appears is.

Banking, finance, and insurance: stable but not fast enough on mobile. Financial services land in the middle (banking 38.9% mobile, insurance 40.0% mobile) and share a specific weakness: layout stability on mobile, where banking posts a weak good-CLS score at 66.7%. Account dashboards, rate tables, and disclosure content that load in stages are the likely cause.

Education: content wins, except on desktop. Education passes at 60.0% on mobile, one of only five industries above the halfway mark, helped by text-first university and course pages. Its odd desktop result (50.0%, lower than its mobile figure) is worth monitoring and likely reflects a few heavy institutional sites in the sample.

Three neutral takeaways follow from the data.

First, your desktop score is not your real score. Every industry passes at a lower rate on mobile, often dramatically lower. If you are judging your site by a green badge on a laptop, test it on a mid-range phone on a normal connection before you trust it.

Second, the metric that is failing tells you what kind of work you need. A failing loading time points to images, caching, and server response. A failing interaction time points to JavaScript. A failing stability score points to content that loads without reserved space. These are different problems with different fixes.

Third, the gap between the leaders and the laggards in every category is a competitive opening. Healthcare's median site loads its main content in under two seconds on mobile; a healthcare competitor at four seconds is visibly behind. In retail, the stores that pull ahead on Core Web Vitals gain an edge on both rankings and conversions.

This pillar summarizes at the industry level. For a closer look at how specific sectors and local verticals perform, see the individual studies:

• Healthcare websites: 78.9% pass on mobile, tied for first
• Law firm websites: the local verticals compared
• Real estate websites: 75.0% pass on mobile, the top three surprise
• Bank and credit union websites: the local finance breakdown
• Restaurant websites: inside the 33.3% food and restaurants pass rate
• University websites: what powers education's 60.0% mobile pass rate
• Nonprofit websites: 42.1% on mobile, a 32-point desktop-to-mobile fall
• News websites: 60.0% on mobile, 85.0% on desktop, faster than the reputation
• Near me local business speed: the local hub across service verticals

Mobile ranking (Core Web Vitals pass rate, May 2026)

Desktop ranking (Core Web Vitals pass rate, May 2026)

"Sites" is the number of each industry's seed brands present in CrUX for the month. "Good LCP / INP / CLS" is the share of an industry's sites that pass that individual metric. "Median LCP / INP" describes the typical brand's 75th-percentile experience on the stated device.

Data source. Chrome UX Report, May 2026 release (202605), queried on Google BigQuery and aggregated across all countries. CrUX is Google's official real-user field dataset and the source behind its own Core Web Vitals reporting.

Industry mapping. Eighteen industries, each represented by roughly 20 leading global brands, hand-assigned and joined to CrUX. Sample sizes per industry range from 17 to 20 depending on how many seed brands meet CrUX's traffic threshold in the month.

Pass definition. A site passes when its 75th-percentile values are good on all three Core Web Vitals: LCP at or under 2,500 ms, INP at or under 200 ms, and CLS at or under 0.10. INP is required only where measured.

Scoring. Each brand is matched to its main host and credited with its better-performing canonical origin. Industry scores are the equal-weighted share of brands that pass, computed separately for mobile and desktop.

Limitations. The sample is the leading brands in each category, not every site in the industry, so results describe how major players perform rather than the long tail. Core Web Vitals are field data and shift over time. Industries also differ in what their pages do, so part of the spread reflects page type, not engineering quality alone.

Industry pass rates, metric breakdowns, and median values: PageSpeed Matters analysis of the Chrome UX Report, May 2026, via Google BigQuery.

Core Web Vitals definitions and thresholds: Google Search Central, Core Web Vitals and the Chrome UX Report documentation.

Supporting business statistics, cited to their original publishers: Google (conversion loss per second of delay; bounce rate by load time), Portent (conversion rate by site speed), Deloitte (Milliseconds Make Millions), Think with Google (visitor abandonment by load time), and Statista (mobile share of web traffic).

Published by Matt Suffoletto, June 2026.