Page speed statistics: how fast Belgian business websites load, per CMS

The median Belgian small business website shows its main content on a phone after 1.8 seconds; the mean is 2.4 seconds. Two in three sites (68.1 percent) stay within the 2.5 seconds Google rates as good, and 14.8 percent take more than 4 seconds. WordPress sites are the slowest, and the gap comes from the server, not from page weight.

These page speed statistics come from our October 2026 measurement of 426 websites across every Belgian province, part of our study of Belgian business websites in 2026. Few speed datasets cover small European businesses, because Google's own field data only exists for sites with enough traffic. To measure a site of your own the same way, use our website speed test.

How long a Belgian business website takes to load

Load time is not one number. A browser goes through several moments, and each says something different.

Largest Contentful Paint, the moment the largest image or text block appears, is the measure Google uses in its Core Web Vitals: good up to 2.5 seconds, needs improvement up to 4, poor beyond. The mean sits above the median because a small group of very slow sites pulls it up: the slowest tenth need more than 4.8 seconds.

One site in five (20.9 percent) shows its main content within a second; 25 sites (5.9 percent) need more than six. These times were measured without throttling on a fast fixed line. On 4G or weak Wi-Fi everything is slower, so a site already above 2.5 seconds here feels slow to a visitor in the street.

Page speed by CMS

The platform makes the biggest difference. Wix and custom-built sites show their main content after 1.4 seconds at the median, WordPress sites after 2.4 seconds. Only 52.1 percent of WordPress sites stay within Google's threshold, against 88.6 percent of Wix sites.

Weight is not the cause: a WordPress page weighs about the same as any other. The server is. A WordPress site sends its first byte after 0.74 seconds, more than twice as late as Wix (0.38) or custom builds (0.30). WordPress assembles each page on every visit and often runs on cheap shared hosting without caching; Wix and static sites serve a ready-made page. Why that happens and how to fix it is in why is WordPress so slow.

Wix loads far more files (151 at the median, against 74 for WordPress), but they come from a fast network and do not hold up the first paint. File count says little; server wait and the weight of the main image say more.

Page speed by sector

Healthcare practices run the lightest, fastest sites: half carry less than 0.6 MB of images. Hairdressers, beauty salons and gyms run the slowest: close to half are on WordPress (24 of 55) and their images weigh 1.3 MB at the median. Hospitality has the heaviest pages (3.1 MB at the median) yet loads well; only a quarter of restaurant sites (17 of 62) run WordPress.

Speed by region, and what a CDN does

The three regions are close. Walloon sites answer slightly later, but the difference in main content is a tenth of a second, so for a buyer comparing Belgian markets, speed is not a regional story.

81 of 427 sites (19.0 percent) run behind Cloudflare, a network that places pages closer to the visitor. Their main content arrives after 1.8 seconds at the median, the same as sites without it. A CDN alone does not make a slow site fast: if the server rebuilds the page on every visit, that wait remains. It only helps once the page itself may stay cached in the network.

How heavy a small business website is

A home page weighs 2.3 MB at the median and fetches 64 files. The mean is 4.5 MB, because one site in ten makes a phone download more than 8.8 MB. 39.6 percent weigh over 3 MB.

Images are the biggest part. Sites with over 3 MB of images show their main content after 2.5 seconds at the median, right on Google's line. One of our own cases shows the gain: the Villa Lidia home page went from 8.4 to 1.4 MB. The method is in how to improve website speed.

Website speed and conversion: what to fix first

• Choose caching or better hostingif you run WordPress. Most of the gain is in the first byte: a page that is ready, not rebuilt on every visit. See website maintenance.
• Choose smaller imagesif your page weighs more than 3 MB. A hero photo does not need 4 MB; in a modern format and at the right size, 200 kB is enough.
• Choose a lighter themeif your page pulls more than 100 files from your own server.
• Choose a rebuildif the first byte stays above a second after caching and better hosting; then the problem is the foundation. What the choice between platforms means is in Wix or WordPress and Webflow or WordPress.

Speed also affects whether a visitor stays long enough to enquire. If speed is your reason to start over, see website design or book a call.

Method and limits

We measured the home page, not the whole site, once per site. Load time varies from visit to visit, so a single site may be faster or slower next time; across 426 sites that averages out. The measuring machine was running other work, which can lift times slightly for every site alike. Use these times to compare sites, sectors and platforms, and as a lower bound for what a visitor on 4G experiences.

Google's real-user data (the Chrome UX Report) only covers sites with enough visitors, which excludes most small businesses; this is therefore a lab measurement. The full sampling method is in the main study.