Google have published some interesting data on how long it takes for typical websites to load up around the world.
Such ‘stat p0rn’ is of particular interest to webmasters who want to compare their own website load times to see if they are quick enough – like it or not, research proves that slow load times can lose visitors…
Page Load Times By Platform
The load time on mobile internet is about 1.5 times slower than on desktops – even taking into account that many popular sites already optimize the page for mobile visitors.
Mobile hardware may be improving but it’s still a long way off the power of modern desktop and laptops in rendering more sophisticated web graphics and media. The 3G speed of mobile internet (common in much of the world) is also generally slower than fixed internet – although 4G may radically change the situation.
The graph below shows the average speed data for page load times across desktop and mobile platforms:
Note: I had to remind myself of the difference between Mean and Median. For any other non-maths experts:
- Mean is what we normally think of as an ‘average’ – add up x numbers and divide by x. e.g. the Mean of 1, 2, 3, 4 and 90 is 20. If these were page load times in seconds the mean would be highly skewed by the 90s time into giving a very unrepresentative ‘average’ – 20 seconds is clearly not a good indicator when 4 out of 5 sites load in 4 seconds or less.
- Median is the middle number when the set is sorted in numerical order – in the above example the Median is 3. This is a far better ‘average’ when comparing page load times as it is more representative of the typical website.
Page Load Time by Platform
From the graph, the median ‘average’ page loads in just under 3 seconds. Google’s research shows that whilst 50% load in under 3 seconds another 27% take just 3 to 7 seconds. So it’s fair to say that if your page loads in less than 3 seconds you’re in the top half of websites – good job.
Page Load Times By Country
The following graph shows page load speed in a selection of countries:
Load Speed by Country
Median speeds are as might be expected – developed, industrialized and rich countries tend to score most highly as they benefit from higher investment in (and take up of) broadband infrastructure. There are no real shocks in the bottom half of the table but, in the top half, Vietnam stands out as a country punching above its weight – beating US and most of Europe on median benchmarks.
Page Load Time By Type Of Website
There is very little difference in load times between types of website – most are tightly clustered around the 3 seconds median mark apart from Entertainment (c 4 seconds) and News (c 6 seconds). It isn’t a great surprise that these two categories are the slowest sites to load – Entertainment sites often feature the most videos, pictures and multimedia content which all make pages load more slowly.
News sites are by far the slowest (median and mean) because each page typically features dozens of excerpts, pictures and links to other articles – and crams in as many bandwidth consuming adverts as possible. Most news websites are not profitable so they advertize and promote extremely heavily in an attempt to offset costs.
[Via: Google Analytics Blog]
Interesting stuff.. the charts don’t specify what type of connection used on the mobile devices, but I assume they were both (desktop and mobile devices) on wifi. It seems like on Wifi my iPhone loads websites a few secs after my desktop could load them (as indicated by the first chart). When the phone is using mobile 3G connection though, the difference is much more dramatic. It takes my phone anywhere from 5 seconds to 30 seconds to load webpages using 3G. :/
That sounds like a long time for 3G Dex. Unfortunately ’3G’ covers a wide range of speeds from quite good to somewhat glacial…
The type of connection is probably unknown because the charts are from Google Analytics data on webservers. I don’t think there is any way for a website hosting server to tell if a mobile is using wifi or 3G? Can’t even infer it from the broadband provider name because many mobile providers do fixed line/home broadband too.
Judging by the stats though I suspect you’re right and most of the mobile connections are wifi or they’d likely be even slower.
Oh I didn’t realize the data was from Google Analytics. I thought Google just did a study on the subject by testing different mobile devices/PCs connection speeds. It does make sense that WiFi probably has a much higher weighing for mobile device connections. I use WiFi every chance I get on my phone (because of the faster data speeds). I wonder if iPod Touch, iPads, and other tablets are included in this data. The former is only used on WiFi, and iPads/Tablets are available on both WiFI and 3G, but consumers overwhelmingly favor the WiFi-only versions.
Fairly sure that the mobile data includes iPod Touch, iPads, and other tablets/phones – these are differentiated by OS and brand in Analytics so they certainly had all that info available.
But as you say, most people probably use wifi for speed and to avoid data caps wherever possible even if they have 3G access.