We tested 34 of Romania's best-known websites. Not one reached Google's "good" score

We recently wrote that a website's speed is measured, not declared — and that the test is public, free, and available to anyone. So we took the next step: we picked 34 of Romania's best-known websites — banks, major retailers, telecoms, pharmacies, real estate, job boards — and put every one of them through the exact same test: Lighthouse, Google's measurement tool, on the mobile profile, on the same day, under identical conditions.

The result, in one line: not one of the 34 reached the 90-point threshold in the Lighthouse test — the one Google marks green and calls "good". Not one.

The full ranking

The same numbers as a table — the score runs on a 0–100 scale, LCP is the time until the main content appears (Google's "good" threshold: 2.5 seconds), CLS measures how much the page jumps around while loading (threshold: 0.1):

What the numbers say beyond the ranking

• The median score is 44.5 — half of the 34 sites tested sit below 45 points, deep under the threshold where Google even colors a score orange (50).
• All 34 exceed the 2.5-second LCP threshold in the lab test. The best time measured: 4.3 seconds (BCR). Twenty-three of them pass 10 seconds.
• Banks lead the ranking — ING (65) and Banca Transilvania (64) hold the highest scores of the 34. But a bank also sits near the bottom: under test conditions, BRD's page had the longest display time in the study — 72.8 seconds on the first run; a second run measured 39.3 seconds. Even the better result is more than 15 times the threshold.
• The two specialist electronics retailers in the test close the ranking: Altex 30, Flanco 32 — both in the bottom ten, in precisely the category where customers compare prices on their phones, right in the store.
• Visual stability is the silent problem: 7 sites exceed, in the test, the 0.1 CLS threshold — and an eighth, Vodafone, sits right at the line (0.0996, displayed as 0.10 in the table). The record: 1.09 — more than ten times the threshold. At a CLS that high, page elements keep moving after they appear — the kind of shift that makes you tap the wrong thing.

Why this happens — honestly, without mockery

To be clear: these websites are built by capable people inside large organizations. That's precisely the story. A major retail or banking site accumulates, year after year, layers nobody can easily remove: legacy platforms, dozens of marketing and analytics scripts, cookie banners, A/B tests, chat widgets, personalization. Every layer was added for a reason. Put end to end, they are exactly the causes we wrote about: a website isn't slow by accident, it's slow by construction — and at their scale, rebuilding is a multi-year project, not a monthly one.

The useful conclusion isn't "look how weak they are". Quite the opposite: this is where small businesses hold the advantage. A business building its website today, from zero, treating speed as an architecture decision — not an end-of-project optimization — can offer an experience the giants can no longer buy. It's one of the few places in the market where an SME can be, measurably, ahead of eMAG.

And us? On the table, next to them

The full methodology — so you can repeat the test

• The tool: Lighthouse 13.4, Google's performance test — the same one anyone can run at pagespeed.web.dev.
• The profile: simulated mobile (mid-range phone, slow 4G network) — the standard conditions of Google's test, identical for everyone.
• What we measured: we requested each site's main address (https://domain.ro/) and measured the page the site delivered, redirects included — on July 28, 2026, from the same location, on the same machine, our own site included. Seven sites delivered something other than the bare domain: Banca Transilvania redirected to a campaign page (campanie.bancatransilvania.ro), Farmacia Tei to its shop at comenzi.farmaciatei.ro, Digi24 and OLX to their mobile versions (m.), BCR and ING to their retail-banking sections, and BestJobs to its job-listings page.
• Selection: we started with 36 sites; two (leroymerlin.ro and christiantour.ro) returned no valid measurement in the test and were excluded.
• Our own sites: tangled-design.ro appears with the measurement taken after our same-day optimization (87 in the morning, 96 after removing the render-blocking CSS — the final figure confirmed in two identical consecutive runs). Every other site carries its morning-round numbers.
• Fairness: for the 7 sites with extreme display times on the first run (LCP over 25 seconds) we ran the test twice and kept the result with the better score. At extreme timings, run-to-run variance can be large — BRD, for instance: 72.8 seconds, then 39.3.
• Limits, stated openly: this is a lab test — a controlled simulation, not the average of real visitors (Google measures that separately, from field data, and it can look different — usually better, thanks to caching and returning visitors). Scores change from day to day; yours today may differ from ours on July 28. The test covers only the page delivered at the main address, not the whole site.
• Right of reply: if you represent one of the sites tested and have better measurements or relevant context, write to us — we'll gladly update the article, source included.

What to do with this information

If you run a business, the question isn't "why is eMAG slow" — it's "where am I in this ranking". You can find out in two minutes, free: pagespeed.web.dev, your address, the mobile result. How to read the numbers — and why speed is decided at a website's foundation, not at the end — we explained here. And if the result gets you thinking and you want an honest opinion on what could be done — repair or rebuild, costs in the open — describe your project. We measure before and after. Publicly, if you want.