How Much Do You Know About Website Speed? [Infographic]

Website speed is an important topic in web development. This is especially true now that Google announced speed would be a ranking factor for mobile pages and not just desktop ones. This means trouble for a lot of websites.

The average mobile web page takes 22 seconds to load; that’s obviously too much. Desktop websites are faster, but they don’t fare much better. The average desktop web page loads in 9.3 seconds.

Many websites clearly need a speed upgrade. And yet, a lot of website owners are in the dark about website speed. Luckily, the hosting review experts at the Hosting Tribunal have collected data that shows how fast your website should be and why.

We have already mentioned Google’s search algorithm taking speed into account. But bad search rankings aren’t the only drawback of slowness. Slow speeds even put off the visitors who do find your site.

53% of visitors don’t wait longer than 3 seconds for a page to load. And the rest open fewer total pages. If your page loads in 2 seconds, a visitor looks at 8.9 pages on average. If it takes 8 seconds, the count goes down to 3.3 viewed pages.

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The expectations are just a little lower for mobile websites. If a website takes 5 seconds to load on a smartphone, 74% of visitors leave. That’s not much better than for desktop websites. But the 22 and 9.3 second load times are in stark contrast.

It seems online stores suffer the most. If you sell online, long load times can ruin your profit margin. For each second of added delay, your conversion rate drops by 7%. It’s not too bad if your website takes 2 seconds to load. If it takes 10 seconds, though, you lose almost half of your profits.

In the end, how quickly should your website load?

Well, the fastest websites take less than a second. But this is almost never feasible. So strive to keep your load times below the 3-second mark. Do this and you will avoid any serious drawbacks. And if you’d like to learn more, we have a helpful infographic for you below.