Google says sites are faster and abandonment rates are down since making page speed a ranking factor last year.
In 2018, Google made page speed a ranking factor for mobile searches.
Around that time improvements starting being observed across the whole web ecosystem. On a per country basis, web pages in more than 95% of countries have improved speeds.
There was even improvement in a certain segment of sites where there was no improvement the previous year:
“For the slowest one-third of traffic, we saw user-centric performance metrics improve by 15% to 20% in 2018. As a comparison, no improvement was seen in 2017.”
Developers are clearly making page speed a priority. In 2018, they ran over a billion PageSpeed Insights audits for over 200 million unique URLs.
Abandonment Rates are Down
As is well understood in online marketing–the longer a site takes to load, the more likely users are to abandon it.
Well, it turns out the opposite is also true. 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 measure their abandonment rate metric via the Network Error Logging API available in Chrome.
