According to Google’s latest research, the average mobile landing page takes 22 seconds to load. However, 53% of people will leave a mobile page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.
Clearly, the average mobile page is not meeting users’ expectations. This issue spans across all industries. Readers expect immediate access to articles. Shoppers will abandon their carts if an e-commerce site is too slow. Customers want to quickly pay bills on banking sites, and vacationers seek instant reviews—among other scenarios.
The reality, according to Google, is that 70% of pages take 7 seconds for the visual content above the fold to appear. It takes 10 seconds for all visual content, above and below the fold, to fully load. This is concerning because, as page load time increases from 1 second to 7 seconds, the likelihood of a visitor abandoning the page rises by 113%.
Speed impacts more than just page views; it affects revenue. Google’s recent data indicates that conversions are lower on mobile devices than on desktops, even though more than half of all web traffic comes from mobile devices.
Google’s analysis of 900,000 mobile ad landing pages across 126 countries led to the conclusion that “the majority of mobile sites are slow and bloated with too many elements.”
To illustrate how bloated mobile web pages are, Google found that 70% of the pages analyzed were over 1MB, 36% were over 2MB, and 12% were over 4MB. For reference, a page of 1.49MB takes 7 seconds to load on a fast 3G connection.
This results in a direct decrease in conversions. As the number of elements on a page increases from 400 to 6,000, the likelihood of users converting drops by 95%.
“No matter what, faster is better and less is more.”
### What Should Site Owners Do?
Google suggests that 30% of the pages it analyzed could save over 250KB simply by compressing images and text. It recommends using tools to test your site for mobile-friendliness and mobile page speed and then comparing it against the latest benchmarks.
For more details about the latest industry benchmarks for mobile page speed and how they vary among different market sectors, you can view the full report.
