Speculation rules eagerness on React sites

Conservative, moderate, eager or immediate: which speculation rules sites use, and whether those sites pass LCP, INP and CLS more often.

Field data PhoneDesktopAll Scope All sites October 2026 edition · Desktop field outcomes · React sites only
React Scoped to 9,570 sites out of 210,902 analyzed (frameworks) Compare with all sites →

16.6% of React sites have no speculation rules. Of the 83.4% that do, 72% use eager, and 88% of those sites pass all three Core Web Vitals, against 63% of all React sites.

The State of Web Vitals · October 2026 · React: 9,570 crawled sites · 1,979 with desktop field dataBy Arjen Karel · corewebvitals.io/state-of-cwv
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Core Web Vitals pass rate

Sites with eager speculation rules pass all three Core Web Vitals most often: 88%, against 63% of all React sites. The biggest gap is CLS, 96% against 80%.

SitesAll three good · at least one needs improvement · at least one poor
All React sites1,97963%
Eager 60.1%73288%
Immediate 0.1%683%
Moderate 0.8%2858%
Conservative 22.4%73552%
No rules 16.6%47850%
GoodNeeds improvementPoorSites: with Chrome field data
The State of Web Vitals · October 2026 · React: 9,570 crawled sites · 1,979 with desktop field dataBy Arjen Karel · corewebvitals.io/state-of-cwv
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Speculation rules usage

83.4% of React sites use speculation rules, and 72% of those use eager.

All React sites 9,570 sites
No rules 16.6% Speculation rules 83.4%
Sites with speculation rules 7,977 sites
Eager 72.1% Conservative 26.9%
Eager 72.1% Conservative 26.9% Moderate 0.9% Immediate 0.1%
The State of Web Vitals · October 2026 · React: 9,570 crawled sites · 1,979 with desktop field dataBy Arjen Karel · corewebvitals.io/state-of-cwv
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Speculation rules per platform

Wix sets the speculation rules to eager on 99% of its sites, and 88% of Wix sites pass all three Core Web Vitals, against 63% of all sites. WordPress sets the speculation rules to conservative on 89% of its sites, and 51% of WordPress sites pass all three.

PlatformSpeculation rules on its sitesPass all three
All React sites 9,570 sitesEager 60%Conservative 22%No rules 17%63%
Wix 5,824 sitesEager 99%88%
WordPress 2,342 sitesConservative 89%51%
Eager Conservative No rules Moderate Immediate
The State of Web Vitals · October 2026 · React: 9,570 crawled sites · 1,979 with desktop field dataBy Arjen Karel · corewebvitals.io/state-of-cwv
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Speculation rules or the platform

Does the platform explain the speculation rules difference?

Almost every site with eager speculation rules is a Wix site, and almost every Wix site has eager speculation rules, so the data can't tell eager speculation rules and Wix apart. On WordPress, 51% of sites with conservative speculation rules pass all three Core Web Vitals, against 55% of WordPress sites with none. Within WordPress, sites with conservative and none pass all three about equally often.

How much speculation rules speed up the next page

Speculation rules only speed up the page a visitor opens next, not the page they land on, and Chrome's field data counts both. A prefetch fetches the next page's HTML early, which takes time off its TTFB and its LCP. A prerender also builds the next page before the click, so it can open with an LCP close to zero and its layout shifts happen out of sight. In Shopify's test, moderate cut the median LCP of the next page by 228 ms on desktop compared with conservative, and by 24 ms on phones.

The State of Web Vitals · October 2026 · React: 9,570 crawled sites · 1,979 with desktop field dataBy Arjen Karel · corewebvitals.io/state-of-cwv
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Understanding speculation rules eagerness

Use eager. Sites with eager speculation rules pass all three Core Web Vitals most often, and the theory fits: the earlier Chrome starts, the more of the next page is ready when the visitor clicks. Almost all of those sites are Wix sites, so part of that lead is the platform. The cost is pages loaded that nobody opens, so check that your server can take the extra requests. Conservative waits until the visitor presses a link. Moderate starts after a 200 ms hover on desktop, and on a phone half a second after scrolling stops near a link. Eager starts after a 10 ms hover on desktop, and on a phone once a link has been on screen for 50 ms. Immediate starts as soon as Chrome reads the rule. On WordPress, core uses conservative, which made no visible difference in this data; the wp_speculation_rules_configuration filter switches it to eager.

The State of Web Vitals · October 2026 · React: 9,570 crawled sites · 1,979 with desktop field dataBy Arjen Karel · corewebvitals.io/state-of-cwv
Related signals Speculation posture → By Arjen Karel · 9,570 crawled React sites (1,979 with desktop Chrome field data, October 2026) · How we measured