Which is the fastest postal service website in Europe?

Postal service websites must provide fast and reliable access to essential services, ranging from tracking deliveries and locating local branches to purchasing postage and managing mail. Users access these websites from a variety of devices and network connections, often while on the go.

In recent years, many of these services have focused on expanding their digital platforms and have offered discounts to customers who choose to use their online services instead of visiting a store. Given this shift in business strategy, it is more important than ever that these websites be fast.

To better understand the performance of these websites, we analyzed 25 national postal service websites across Europe. We wanted to determine which postal websites provide the fastest user experience, and we examined the factors that set the top-performing websites apart from the rest.

What We Analyzed

Our analysis is based on real-world usage data collected by Google from Chrome users who visit these websites. This dataset, known as the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX), provides insight into the actual experiences of website visitors, rather than simulated test results.

We reviewed all three core Web Vitals metrics on the websites of each post office:

• Paint with the highest content (LCP): measures page-loading performance
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP): measures responsiveness to user interactions
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): measures visual stability while the page is loading

Let's take a look at the European rankings.

Page Speed Rankings for the European Postal Service's Website

The map below shows impressive results across Europe. The two standouts are Norway’s posten.no and Switzerland’s post.ch, both with LCP scores under 1 second. Seventeen of the tested websites achieved scores under 2 seconds, which is well within the acceptable range of 2.5 seconds.

In fact, only two websites fell within the 2.5–4-second range for improvement needed: the Spanish site correos.es at 2.73 seconds and the Hungarian site posta.hu at 3.49 seconds.

tip

View the complete benchmark results.

The 10 Most Popular Posting Sites

If we look at the CrUX leaderboard, we can see the scores for all Core Web Vitals metrics. Not only does Norway lead the LCP rankings, but its CLS and INP scores are also well within the target range. All 10 of the top websites have good INP scores under 200 ms, and four of them far exceed this target with INP scores under 100 ms.

Looking at the CLS, four websites have scores outside the acceptable range. The Romanian postal service, posta-romana.ro, has the worst CLS score, at 0.61.

The Bottom 10 Websites

If we look at the last ten websites in our ranking, we can see a similar trend.

The standout result here is the Spanish site correos.es, which we know needs improvement in terms of LCP. Their INP score is 278 ms, which means that their website not only takes a long time to display the main content on the page but is also slow in terms of interactions.

In contrast, the INP score for Hungary’s posta.hu is 121 ms, which comfortably places it in the “good” range, even though its LCP falls within the “needs improvement” range.

Why does Norway have the fastest website?

Norway’s posten.no is the clear winner in our rankings, with excellent scores across all three Core Web Vitals metrics. Their success is impressive, starting with a Time To First Byte (TTFB) score of 428 ms. This is the server’s fast response time to the initial request. Combining a fast TTFB with server-side rendering and a small HTML document size allows content to be displayed quickly on the page for the user.

Although the results are impressive—with just a few small requests that block rendering completing quickly—there are still some opportunities for optimization when reviewing the request waterfall. The LCP image is 120 KB. This can be changed to a modern, smaller image format, which will speed up the download of the resource.

Why are Spain and Hungary performing the worst?

As mentioned earlier, Spain and Hungary are the only two countries that fall outside the range corresponding to the “Most Content” paint metric. Let’s take a look at each country to see why they are currently unable to achieve a good score.

Correos.es​

The Spanish site correos.es has a good CrUX TTFB score of 453 ms. The main issue holding the site back is the hiding of content via CSS, which we observed during our lab tests. This technique is mainly used for A/B testing or design decisions. In this situation, the CSS negatively impacts the First Contentful Paint (FCP) score, resulting in visitors seeing the page’s content much later than they should.

For visitors with the 81% user agent, the LCP element is a background image. This image was loaded late in the page-loading process because Chrome gives higher priority to larger images.

Since we know this is the only image that appears above the fold, it can be preloaded using the `fetchpriority=”high”` parameter. The HTML document itself already references the image, so there is no request chain involving a CSS file.

One positive aspect is the use of the back/forward cache. Since visitors navigate between pages using 24% while this cache is enabled, page transitions are significantly faster, contributing to a smoother overall browsing experience.

Posta.hu

Hungary’s posta.hu ranks at the bottom of our list with an LCP score of 3.49 seconds. Looking at the lab test and examining the data further, we can immediately see where their problems lie. They have a CrUX TTFB of 371 ms, which is faster than posten.no’s score of 428 ms.

However, the first meaningful rendering does not occur until after an additional 3.3-second delay.

The main reason for this delay becomes clear when we look at the request waterfall. There are 48 requests blocking rendering. The website also does not support the newer HTTP/2 protocol, which means that multiple server connections must be established, and the browser delays the other requests until they become available again.

An excessive number of render-blocking requests causes significant delays, as each request takes longer to process than the previous one. One such request is a 741 kb JavaScript file that is detected late, causing even further delays in content rendering.

In addition to scripts that block excessive rendering, further improvements are needed. If we look at the LCP image detection waterfall chart, we can see that the HTML request is larger than what we typically see.

Focusing on the LCP image itself, the image is 165 kb. It would be better to switch to a modern, preloaded image format and serve the image from within the HTML document rather than via a new connection.

Conclusion

Norway's posten.no is the clear winner, delivering excellent performance across all three Core Web Vitals. Since only two websites fall outside the good LCP range, European postal services generally perform well, which means that customers looking to take advantage of online discounts will generally not experience slow loading times.

For slower websites, following best practices can lead to significant improvements. Optimizing LCP images using modern formats and preloading, as well as reducing render-blocking resources, would contribute to faster load times. Hungary’s posta.hu stands out among the websites requiring the most work. Given its fast TTFB, addressing excessive render-blocking requests would have a significant impact.

Source: www.debugbear.com. Strategic synthesis and GEO-optimization by Digiösvény.