Understanding beehiiv website performance

When you run a performance audit tool like Google PageSpeed Insights or Lighthouse on your beehiiv publication, you may see scores for Core Web Vitals, accessibility, and site speed. These tools measure how quickly your pages load, how stable they appear, and how accessible they are to all visitors. 

While beehiiv automatically applies many optimizations to improve these scores (image lazy loading, CDN delivery, browser caching), some factors are controlled at the platform level and cannot be customized through the Website Builder. This article explains what influences your performance scores, which elements you can optimize, and what beehiiv handles for you.

Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics Google uses to measure user experience on your website. They focus on three key areas: loading speed (Largest Contentful Paint or LCP), interactivity (Interaction to Next Paint or INP), and visual stability (Cumulative Layout Shift or CLS).

These metrics can influence your search rankings. Pages that meet Google's thresholds for ‘Good’ performance may rank higher in search results than slower competitors. Beyond SEO, good Core Web Vitals mean your readers experience fast page loads and smooth interactions, which can reduce bounce rates and improve engagement.

Tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, Lighthouse, and Google Search Console let you measure your site's Core Web Vitals and get a performance score. These tools test your site under simulated conditions (mobile tests throttle bandwidth and increase latency to mimic real-world mobile networks), so scores for mobile are often lower than desktop even when your site design is identical.

beehiiv applies performance optimizations at the platform level that you don't need to configure:

Image optimization and lazy loading: Images are served with automatic format conversion and sizing based on the visitor's device. The first few images on your page load immediately with high priority to ensure fast visual rendering, while images further down the page use lazy loading so they only load when the visitor scrolls near them. Small elements like navbar logos and author avatars are served at appropriately constrained sizes rather than full resolution.

Content Delivery Network (CDN): Your site is served through a global CDN, which caches your content on servers around the world. Visitors load your pages from a server geographically close to them, reducing latency and improving load times.

Browser caching: beehiiv enables browser caching so returning visitors load your pages faster.

Analytics script deferral: External tracking pixels and analytics scripts load outside the critical render path to avoid blocking page interactivity.

Font loading: Web fonts (including custom fonts you upload) use font-display: swap to prevent invisible text during load, so visitors see fallback text immediately while your chosen font loads in the background.

These optimizations run automatically on all published sites. You don't need to enable or configure them.

While much of your site's performance is managed by beehiiv, you do have control over content choices that affect your scores:

Image file sizes: The platform optimizes delivery, but starting with smaller source images helps. If you upload a 10MB high-resolution photo when a 2MB version would display identically on screen, the larger file still takes longer to process and deliver. Compress or resize images before uploading when possible.

Number of images per page: Be thoughtful about how many posts you load on to any given page. A homepage with 92 images will load more slowly than one with 10 images, even with lazy loading and CDN optimization. Consider whether every image adds value or whether simpler layouts might load faster. Utilize our Archive post feature to have pagination. 

To archive a post: 

1. Go to Newsletters > Posts from the left panel of your account, then click the name of any published post.
2. Click the dropdown arrow next to Edit Post and select Archive. Archiving a post will make it unavailable on the web and your publication site, but it will remain accessible within your account.
   
   
   

Third-party embeds and scripts: Embedded content from external platforms (YouTube videos, social media widgets, external iframes) can slow your page significantly because you're loading resources from another server. Place embeds strategically and avoid adding many above the fold.

Content structure: Complex page layouts with many nested sections, widgets, and dynamic post lists can increase the data your browser needs to fetch and render. Simpler designs typically perform better.

Custom fonts: Each custom font you upload adds to the page weight. Limit the number of font families and weights you use. System fonts load fastest because they're already installed on the visitor's device.

Performance is only one part of how search engines evaluate your site. The technical SEO foundations that help Google understand and index your content are built into every published beehiiv site. 

You don't need to configure anything if you do not want to, but you do have the option to customize, if you wish. 

Meta tags and canonical URLs: Every page and post automatically includes a title, meta description, and canonical URL, so search engines know what each page is about and which version to index. You can override the title and description on any page or post, but sensible defaults are always in place.

Social sharing previews: When someone shares your page on X, Facebook, LinkedIn, or in a text message, beehiiv generates the Open Graph and Twitter card tags that produce a rich preview with your title, description, and image. You can customize these per page and per post.

Structured data: beehiiv automatically adds schema.org structured data (the machine-readable markup Google uses for rich results) to your posts, author pages, products, and podcast episodes, including article, breadcrumb, organization, and author markup. Advanced users can add custom structured data for formats like FAQs, recipes, events, and reviews.

Sitemap and robots.txt: Your site automatically generates and maintains a sitemap.xml that lists your posts, pages, tags, authors, and products so search engines can discover your content, along with a robots.txt file that tells crawlers how to index your site. Both update as you publish, and you can edit your robots.txt or hide pages from search with the noindex setting.

RSS feeds and clean URLs: Your content is served with RSS feeds, readable URL slugs, and the correct language tag, and beehiiv automatically redirects visitors from your beehiiv subdomain to your custom domain so search authority consolidates on a single canonical address.

As with performance, some SEO factors stay within your control: writing descriptive titles and meta descriptions, using clear heading structure, adding alt text to images, and publishing quality content that earns links remain the biggest levers for ranking.

Some aspects of your site's performance are determined by beehiiv's platform architecture and cannot be customized through the Website Builder:

Custom head code and preload tags: The Website Builder does not support adding custom code to the <head> section of your pages, so you cannot manually preload specific resources or add custom performance hints.

Above-the-fold rendering: The platform determines which images load with high priority and which use lazy loading based on their position in the page structure. You cannot manually tag a specific image as the LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) element.

HTTP headers and caching policies: Server-side caching, compression , and HTTP response headers are managed by beehiiv's infrastructure. You cannot modify these settings and these are not issues you can resolve by changing content or settings in the Website Builder.

To understand what's affecting your scores, use these tools:

Google PageSpeed Insights: Enter your publication URL at pagespeed.web.dev. Run tests for both mobile and desktop. The tool shows your Core Web Vitals scores and lists specific opportunities (like image sizing or render-blocking resources). Focus on the 'Opportunities' and 'Diagnostics' sections to see what's slowing your page.

Lighthouse in Chrome DevTools: Open your site in Chrome, right-click on the page, and select Inspect. Click on the Lighthouse tab, then click on Analyze page load. This runs the same audit as PageSpeed Insights but lets you test while logged in or on draft pages.

Google Search Console: If you've verified your site with Google Search Console, the Core Web Vitals report shows real-world performance data collected from actual visitors over the past 28 days. This is often more reliable than synthetic tests because it reflects how real users on varied devices and networks experience your site.

Performance scores can vary between tests even on the same page:

Mobile versus desktop: Mobile tests simulate slower networks and devices, so mobile scores are almost always lower. This is expected. A desktop score of 90 and a mobile score of 50 on the same page doesn't mean your mobile site is broken, it means mobile conditions are harder.

Network and server conditions: PageSpeed Insights tests from Google's servers under simulated throttling. Your real-world visitors may experience faster or slower load times depending on their location, device, and connection quality. Google Search Console's Core Web Vitals data (based on real users) is usually more representative than synthetic lab tests.

Cached versus uncached loads: If you test immediately after publishing changes, resources may not be cached yet. Wait a few minutes and test again.

Content changes: Adding more images, embeds, or complex layouts after your last test will lower your score. Removing them will improve it.

Platform updates: beehiiv regularly ships performance improvements (image priority loading, CDN optimizations). If your score improves without you changing anything, a platform update likely helped.

Don't chase a perfect score of 100. Real-world sites with rich content rarely hit 100 on mobile. Focus on meeting Google's 'Good' thresholds for Core Web Vitals. If your scores fall in the 'Needs Improvement' or 'Poor' ranges, start by addressing content-level factors you control.