Fastest Sites Run on Fastly

Page speed isn’t just a point of pride. It’s directly tied to falling bounce rates, climbing conversions, fuller carts, and even customer confidence. When a site loads slowly, users might miss key headings, images, or calls to action, or worse, click away to a competitor.

So when SpeedCurve ranked sites by Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), which measures when a page’s main content loads, we leaned in. Sites like Business Insider, Financial Times, Buzzfeed and Vox.com were among the top performers, and they all run on Fastly.

That’s not a fluke. It’s architecture. Let’s unpack what’s happening, and why it matters.

Why are Fastly sites so fast?

Real-world performance data backs it up. When websites move from Cloudflare to Fastly, they see a 25% faster time to first byte (TTFB), which is about 300 milliseconds shaved off on average. And when sites migrate from Akamai to Fastly, TTFB improves by 200 ms on average (a 57% speed boost), LCP by 300 ms (17% faster), and First Contentful Paint by 200 ms (18% faster). But how does Fastly make that happen?

The answer lies in the programmable edge architecture that goes beyond traditional CDNs. When traditional CDNs stop at caching, Fastly lets you program what happens at the edge. With Instant Purge™, you can cache the “uncacheable,” and the cache is invalidated globally in ~150ms. That means you can cache dynamic content like live inventory, breaking news, or changing prices.

Even under heavy load — like a massive sale event — the software-defined network holds up. You have the flexibility to add many rules to customise the behaviour and caching for each part of your website. Advanced automated rerouting and self-healing features ensure traffic is always routed optimally across the network, regardless of internet weather or unexpected traffic spikes.

With Tier 1 transit, solid-state drive (SSD) powered servers, and an engineering team that lives to optimise for speed, Fastly has built a fantastically-fast network that requires less hardware to deliver comprehensive global reach. The POPs are built with the advantage of modern network topology and hold more data in the cache for longer, resulting in lower egress bills and reduced latency. So yes, we’re called Fastly for a reason.

Practical tips for making your website faster

You don’t always need a front-end overhaul to get speed wins. Some of the best gains come from small changes, especially if you’re already using Fastly. Here are 6 actionable things you can do right away for measurable gains:

1. Optimise your images at the edge
   Resize, compress, and adapt image formats to the device. Fastly’s Image Optimizer handles all of this at the edge, with no asset sprawl, and no redeploys.

2. Cache where it counts
   Use long-lived TTLs for versioned assets, cache APIs where possible, and serve stale while revalidating. This can help you lower latency and cut origin load dramatically (even a 5% cache offload gain can mean 50% less load at the origin).

3. Compress smarter
   Enable Brotli or Gzip, but only once. Compress static content ahead of time and compress dynamic content just in time with Fastly's Dynamic Content Compression.

4. Refresh only when needed
   Don’t re-fetch unless the data has changed or the user asked for it. This keeps things zippy and lowers the server burden.

5. Beware third-party bloat
   Every new domain exception in your Content-Security-Policy adds connection overhead. Proxy third-party content where possible, or drop it if it’s not essential.

6. Optimise your fonts
   Fonts are often overlooked, but without proper care, they can easily require hundreds of kilobytes to load before your content appears. Use the modern WOFF2 format only — all major browsers have supported it for nearly a decade. Consider using widely supported variable fonts, and strip out unused font features to reduce size even further.

Let’s build speedier sites together

If your site already runs on Fastly, this is your invitation to go deeper: audit your cache headers, streamline your image assets, remove unnecessary preloads, and profile where time is spent.

And if you’re not on Fastly… well, you’ve seen the leaderboard.

Contact our team today to unlock speed gains that make a difference.