High Performance by Default: Why Speed Shouldn't Be a Setup Step

Every new service starts the same way: a name, a domain, an origin, and then a decision tree. Turn on compression? Pick a protocol? Enforce TLS the right way? None of these choices are hard for a platform expert. But most people setting up a service aren't platform experts, and the cost of getting them wrong, or skipping them, is real and measurable.

According to Digital Applied's 2026 Page Speed Statistics report, every additional second of load time costs a 7% drop in conversions and an 11% drop in page views. Pages that load in one second convert at 39%; pages that take five seconds convert at 22%. On mobile, the gap widens further, with more than half of visitors abandoning a site that takes over three seconds to load.

Meanwhile, most of the internet still isn't clearing the bar. Google's Chrome User Experience Report for May 2026 found that only 55.9% of tracked origins pass all three Core Web Vitals, and the bar just got higher: Google tightened the Largest Contentful Paint threshold from 2.5 seconds to 2.0 seconds in its March 2026 core update, per Digital Applied's Core Web Vitals benchmark report. Protocol adoption tells a similar story. Despite HTTP/3 support shipping in every major browser, global HTTP/3 traffic sat at only around 21 to 28% in early 2026, according to TechnologyChecker's protocol adoption analysis. The tools to be fast exist. Most services simply aren't configured to use them.

What's second nature to a platform expert shouldn't be a roadblock for everyone else. That's why we built Recommended Defaults: to handle the heavy lifting so customers can skip the manual setup and get straight to building.

What "By Default" Actually Means

Fastly's Recommended Defaults take the highest-impact, lowest-risk performance settings and make them the default state of every new service:

• Compression (Brotli with Gzip fallback) is on automatically, cutting payload size without any manual setup.

• HTTP/3 is enabled from the start, ahead of where most of the internet currently sits.

• TLS is enforced with HSTS, closing a gap that's easy to forget and costly to leave open.

These are the same settings Fastly's own Solutions Engineers and Customer Engineers already recommend in nearly every onboarding conversation. Recommended Defaults simply moves that knowledge out of a person's head and into the product.

Performance and Flexibility by Design

Making something automatic naturally raises a fair question: does that mean less control? It's actually the opposite. Every recommended setting is visible the moment a service is created, explained inline, and fully editable before anything goes live. Instead of an empty configuration screen, you start from a strong, explained baseline and adjust from there. Nothing is hidden and nothing is locked in.

Why this Matters Beyond One Release

Fastly Recommended Defaults are a small, deliberate step toward a bigger shift of raising the bar on performance for our customers from the get-go. We’re shifting from asking our customers, "which products do you want to configure?", to, "here's a strong way to run this, adjust what you need." Performance is the clearest place to begin, because the data is unambiguous and the fix doesn't require customers to weigh trade-offs before they even see traffic.

Speed shouldn't be something a team has to remember to turn on. It should be where every service starts.

Stop configuring, start building. Start your free trial to experience optimized performance from your very first deployment.

Sources:

• Digital Applied, "Page Speed Statistics 2026: Performance and Revenue Impact"

• Digital Applied, "Core Web Vitals Benchmarks 2026: What Good Looks Like"

• TechnologyChecker, "HTTP Protocol Adoption 2026"