Google reports that sites are now faster and abandonment rates have decreased since page speed became a ranking factor last year.
In 2018, Google implemented page speed as a ranking factor specifically for mobile searches. Around this time, improvements were noted throughout the web ecosystem, with web pages in over 95% of countries showing improved speeds.
Notably, there was progress even in segments where no changes were seen the previous year:
“For the slowest one-third of traffic, user-centric performance metrics improved by 15% to 20% in 2018. Comparatively, there was no improvement in 2017.”
This indicates that developers are prioritizing page speed. In 2018 alone, they conducted over a billion PageSpeed Insights audits for more than 200 million unique URLs.
## Abandonment Rates Have Declined
In online marketing, it is well understood that longer load times increase the likelihood of user abandonment. Conversely, when a site loads faster, users are more likely to stay.
“Thanks to these speed improvements, we’ve observed a 20% reduction in abandonment rate for navigations initiated from Search.”
Site owners can assess their abandonment rate using the Network Error Logging API available in Chrome.
