Cloudflare opens BEACON, a public dataset of billions of real-user web measurements

Cloudflare has published BEACON, an anonymized dataset built from billions of real-world performance measurements. The name stands for Browser Experience Across Cloudflare's Observed Network.

It draws on 10,000 of the largest websites on Cloudflare's network, updates daily in Google BigQuery, and follows the community-led RUM Archive standard. Cloudflare says it expands that project's footprint roughly 100-fold.

Who experiences a slower web

BEACON reports all three Core Web Vitals: LCP for loading, CLS for visual stability and INP for responsiveness. The data is published as full histograms rather than averages, so any percentile can be derived, not just P75.

WebKit, currently the only browser engine on iOS, performs best overall, but that advantage is not universal. In 46 countries where WebKit accounts for more than 10% of traffic, its LCP, INP or both are at least 10% worse than Blink-based browsers such as Chrome, Edge and Opera. In Cambodia, WebKit accounts for 17.5% of page views, but its LCP is 50% worse than Blink's.

Government and Politics, Health and Safe for Kids perform best by industry; Ads, Religion and Weather typically perform worst.

What makes pages feel slow

BEACON splits LCP into sub-parts. At the Good threshold, document TTFB is 598ms, load delay 76ms, load duration 119ms and render delay 157ms.

That challenges a common assumption: downloading the resource itself, an image, font or video, usually adds the least to perceived load time. The larger opportunities lie in discovering the LCP candidate and unblocking its render.

INP divides similarly. At the Good threshold, input delay is 18ms, processing time 55ms and presentation delay 56ms. For the slowest interactions JavaScript execution covers the longest period, but presentation time also rises.

Single-page apps and architecture

Cloudflare added support for Chrome's new Soft Navigations API, which reports LCP accurately for client-side navigations common in React, Vue, Angular and Svelte apps. Soft navigations render two to three times faster than hard ones: 582ms versus 1,421ms at P75.

Landing pages remain heavier: P75 is 2,681ms and P95 is 8,940ms, so faster later navigations must offset a slower first experience.

Open data and privacy

BEACON is public on Google BigQuery with the post's queries as examples. Joined with World Bank GDP per capita figures, it shows how economic conditions correlate with web performance by country. Cloudflare Radar will add a Web Performance section pairing BEACON with its Internet Quality Index.

Domain names and URL paths are stripped, records are aggregated by country, operating system, browser and connection protocol, and records with fewer than five data points are discarded. The post is by Ryan Townsend and Nic Jansma.