Is your company’s website mobile-friendly according to Google? According to them, the average time it takes to fully load a mobile landing page is 22 seconds. However, 53% of mobile site visitors leave a page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. That’s a 19 second time difference! This result was concluded after a test of over 900,000 mobile pages that spanned across 126 countries. While individual country statistics were unavailable, the main intention of the study was to confirm the thesis that majority of mobile sites are slow and bloated with too many elements such as images and text that slows down loading time.
How Does It Affect Your Business?
In true Google fashion, they went one step ahead and built a system that tracked bounce rates compared to page loading times. In technical terms, bounce rates indicate the percentage of people who leave your website after only viewing one page. Here are the results:
In short, your slow loading website on mobile simply means that your potential customers might never see the full suite of products and services that you offer as they leave after one page.
Why Is This Important In The Long Run?
Mobile phone coverage is everywhere, it is estimated that 95% of the global population is living in an area covered by a basic 2G mobile-cellular network. In addition, advanced mobile-broadband networks (LTE) have also spread quickly over the last three years to reach almost four billion people. More and more people are searching on mobile and this trend does not seem to be slowing down anytime soon.
Mobile Index
Without going into heavy details, Google will progressively consider the mobile version of your website as more important than the desktop version. While it might sound complicated, there is no reason to go into absolute panic unless your website is completely unusable on mobile. Stay calm and proceed to the next paragraph.
How Fast Or Slow Is My Website?
The most important question! Hop over to this page recommended by Google and simply input your site’s url into the box. Once done, the automatically generates a report which you can download on ways you can improve your website’s performance.
What Now? What Can I Do?
If you are a non-technical person, feel free to hand the report over to your webmaster who can do something about it. If you are building your own website, here are some recommended platforms that require no programming language. However, standard rules such as proper SEO practices still apply. New to SEO? Check out my article on explaining SEO to the layman.
