When it comes to the overall performance of the mobile web, there is some good news and there is some bad news (or you might say, ‘room for improvement’). The good news: Last year the average time to load a mobile landing page dropped around 7 seconds. The bad news: The average for mobile landing page load times is still around 15 seconds.1

Room for Improvement

Last month Google released an article,“Find out how you stack up to new industry benchmarks for mobile page speed,” in which they shared some of these findings in this area. For instance, they found that although global traffic was moving from 3G to 4G, mobile sites were still quite bloated, and 70% of the mobile landing pages they analyzed took more than five seconds to display visual content above the fold.

Impact on the Bottom Line

Why does this matter?

Not only does having a performant web site improve your user’s experience, but it has direct connection to the bottom line. According to some of the research Google did, as page load time goes from one second to 5 seconds, the probability of a mobile visiter bouncing goes up 90%, and if it goes to 10 seconds, the bouncing probability increases to 123%.

To see the impact this could have on revenue, Google created an Impact Calculator. This tool takes your current page speed, average customer order size, and your typical conversion rates, and calculates the amount an increase in performance could make in terms.

They also created a Speed Scorecard where you can quickly compare your mobile performance to the sites of your competitors.

General Guidelines

But what do you shoot for in terms of performance? It’s one thing to say the site needs to be fast. It’s another thing to define the target.

In the above article, Google lays out what it considers to be some best practice guidelines for mobile performance. Of course, some may quibble over the exact numbers, but as this past month (Feb 2018), these are their recommendations:

  • Average speed index: under 3s
  • Average time to first byte: under 1.3s
  • Average request count: under 50
  • Average page weight: under 500KB

You can certainly aim to go lower then these, but overall, these can give you a good baseline to start at.

There’s Still Work to Do

Overall, it’s encouraging to see mobile page sizes dropping, but it’s clear we still have a long way to go. Hopefully, as site owners become more aware of the connection between performance and the bottom line, making a faster mobile experience for their users will become more of a priority.

Resources

  1. Google Research, Webpagetest.org, sampled 11M global mWeb domains loaded using a globally representative 4G connection, January 2018. Cited in https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-resources/data-measurement/mobile-page-speed-new-industry-benchmarks/ ↩︎