What’s new? Cloudflare Web Analytics (RUM) is rolling out accuracy improvements for client‑side soft navigations in single‑page applications (SPAs) such as React, Angular, Vue, or Svelte. The update leverages Google Chrome’s new Soft Navigation API to natively measure Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) on soft navigations, closing a previous blind spot in perceived loading speed.
Vendor claim: The change may alter the volume of pageviews reported in the dashboard and GraphQL API, depending on a site’s front‑end architecture and traffic patterns.
Soft navigations are client‑side route changes that avoid a full page reload. They can be triggered via the Navigation API or History API, meaning even non‑SPA sites that use these APIs can generate soft navigation data.
Cloudflare has expanded its navigationType values:
navigate– traditional hard navigation (full page load).soft-navigation– native Soft Navigation API available; LCP is recorded.routing-apis– Soft Navigation API unavailable (e.g., Safari, Firefox, older Chromium); fallback to Navigation/History API. LCP isn’t collected, but other Core Web Vitals remain.
Prior to this update, all client‑side navigations were bucketed under navigate and measured only via the History API.
For developers, the change is transparent: the same RUM script continues to work, but analytics dashboards and GraphQL queries will now reflect the refined navigation categories and more accurate LCP metrics where supported.
For more details, see Cloudflare’s official changelog post and the Navigation Types documentation.