Cloudflare Publishes Massive Real‑User Web Performance Dataset

Cloudflare has opened its BEACON dataset, an anonymized collection of billions of real‑world performance measurements from 10,000 of the largest sites on its network. The data, updated daily in Google BigQuery, includes full histograms for the Core Web Vitals—Largest Contentful Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift, and Interaction to Next Paint—allowing users to examine any percentile rather than a single average. BEACON also breaks down LCP and INP into sub‑parts that identify where delays occur, such as document TTFB, load delay, and render delay for LCP, and input, processing, and presentation delays for INP. The release highlights performance gaps by browser engine, country, and industry, and adds new metrics for soft navigations used by single‑page applications. Researchers can join BEACON with other datasets to uncover deeper insights and target optimization efforts.