The need for mobile speed

Today, people have high expectations for mobile experiences. Simply loading on a mobile device is no longer enough. To keep people engaged, mobile sites must be fast and relevant.

We depend on our mobile phones for just about everything — finding information when we need it, booking flights and even enjoying our favorite TV shows.

We don’t just expect to have all the world’s information at our fingertips — we expect to get it the instant we’re looking for it. Unfortunately, mobile sites don’t always live up to this expectation, despite major advancements in network speed and device processing power. Slow loading sites frustrate people with bad user experiences and negatively impact publishers.

Unfortunately, based on Google analysis of 10,000+ mobile web domains, we found that most mobile sites don’t meet this bar:

The average load time for mobile sites is 19 seconds over 3G connections.¹ That’s about as long as it takes to sing the entire alphabet song!

Over half of all mobile site visits are abandoned if the page doesn’t load within 3 seconds

Slow loading sites frustrate users and negatively impact publishers. In our new study, “The Need for Mobile Speed”, we found that 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load.³

Additionally, sites that load in 5 seconds vs 19 seconds observed:

• 25% higher ad viewability⁴
• 70% longer average sessions⁵
• 35% lower bounce rates⁶

The study also explored the relationship between page speed and revenue.

While there are several factors that impact revenue, our model projects that publishers whose mobile sites load in 5 seconds earn up to 2x more mobile ad revenue than those whose sites load in 19 seconds.

To study the extent of this problem, we evaluated over 10,000 mobile web domains. Using data generated from Webpagetest.org, Google Analytics and DoubleClick, we looked for what makes mobile sites slow and determined the impact speed has on user engagement and revenue. We found:

3 out of 4 mobile sites take longer than 10 seconds to load and the average time to load is 19 seconds2

Mobile web speed is a problem, but you can fix it on your mobile site and put yourself at the front of the pack.