How fast is the web? Explore billions of real-user measurements with BEACON

Cloudflare has launched BEACON, an anonymized public dataset of billions of daily real-user web performance measurements from 10,000 large websites, designed to reveal how browser, device, network, geography, and site architecture affect user experience beyond developers’ high-end environments. Available through Google BigQuery and based on RUM Archive standards, the dataset reports Core Web Vitals as full histograms, allowing researchers to examine slow experiences in the long tail rather than relying only on 75th-percentile results. Early findings show performance differences among browser engines and industry categories, while LCP and INP sub-metrics indicate that delayed resource discovery, rendering blocks, JavaScript execution, and complex layout work often matter more than download time itself. BEACON also shows that client-side soft navigations are substantially faster than hard navigations, though their benefits must be weighed against potentially slower initial landing pages. By combining the data with sources such as Cloudflare’s Internet Quality Index and World Bank economic indicators, researchers can investigate how network quality and economic conditions relate to web performance, including evidence that lower-bandwidth regions may receive smaller page transfers. Cloudflare says privacy protections remove site identifiers, normalize traffic across included sites, and aggregate records while excluding small groups, with plans to add metrics and incorporate the findings into Cloudflare Radar’s Web Performance section.

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