CMS Performance Benchmarks and Comparisons
IntermediateQuick Answer
TL;DR
Headless CMS API responses typically return in 20-100ms when served via CDN. Traditional CMS page generation (WordPress, Drupal without full-page caching) produces TTFB of 200ms to 2 seconds or more depending on hosting quality. Benchmark with realistic content volumes and query patterns — small dataset tests don't reflect production performance at scale.
Key Takeaways
- Headless CMS API responses: 20-100ms via CDN; 100-400ms uncached origin requests
- Traditional CMS TTFB: 200ms-2s+ without caching; 20-100ms with full-page CDN caching
- Benchmark with production-scale data — 10 documents behaves differently than 100,000
- Editorial performance (Studio load time, query speed) matters as much as delivery performance