Average Page Load Times for 2018 – How does yours compare?
UPDATE – We made a newer version of this for 2020: Average Page Load Times for 2020
With 2018 just around the corner it’s time to be aware of how your site performance compares to the standards of the new year. Each year the average size of a website goes up, but so does the browser’s ability to render it quicker. Does that mean that your site is faster or slower than the average site speed in 2018?
It actually depends on your industry and location, but for each we’ll consider the following:
- What are the new average page load times?
- What’s the typical size of a webpage you should aim to be under?
- How many resources does the standard page load?
- What’s the average server delay, measure in time to first byte?
Once you find your target measurements below, we’ll then cover how you can test your site to see how you compare with the standard in 2018.
This year is all about mobile
Actually, the last few years have all been about mobile. While desktop has and always will be important, take a look at how mobile use has grown over the last years:
After 2014 mobile usage has taken over desktop use, so it’s now the 4th year where we need to continue to focus on mobile first.
Earlier this year Google released some research in which they concluded:
The average time it takes to fully load the average mobile landing page is 22 seconds. However, research also indicates 53% of people will leave a mobile page if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
How can that be? The key above is the word ‘fully.’ Most mobile pages have tons of extra scripts, tracking code, and ads that continue to load after you think the page has loaded. If you think that doesn’t affect you because you’re still using the site, consider the power it’s pulling from your battery and cell data usage.
The following stats are consolidated from that Google report, which focuses on mobile landing page experiences.
What is the average load time?
For this we’re going to consider the average perceived load time, more specifically the ‘speed index’, which measures how long until most of what you can see within your browser screen is loaded.
| Industry | United States | United Kingdom | Germany | Japan |
| Automotive | 9.5 sec | 12.3 sec | 11.0 sec | 10.3 sec |
| Business & Industrial Markets | 8.7 sec | 8.3 sec | 8.2 sec | 8.1 sec |
| Classifieds & Local | 7.9 sec | 8.3 sec | 7.0 sec | 8.3 sec |
| Finance | 8.3 sec | 8.0 sec | 8.6 sec | 7.6 sec |
| Media & Entertainment | 9 sec | 8.8 sec | 7.6 sec | 8.4 sec |
| Retail | 9.8 sec | 10.3 sec | 10.3 sec | 8.3 sec |
| Technology | 11.3 sec | 10.6 sec | 8.8 sec | 10sec |
| Travel | 10.1 sec | 10.9 sec | 7.1 sec | 8.2 sec |
Pick your industry in addition to location and find your industry standard loading time to see if you should improve your website speed.
While the average of the values in the table is 8.66 sec, the recommendation for 2018 is to be under 3 seconds.
What is the average webpage size?
There’s no denying that direct correlation between site speed and site weight. Here we can see the typical download 0f the entire page (including images, scripts, and external files) measured in megabytes.
| Industry | United State | United Kingdom | Germany | Japan |
| Automotive | 2.1 MB | 2.6 MB | 2.6 MB | 2.5 MB |
| Business & Industrial Markets | 1.6 MB | 1.8 MB | 1.5 MB | 1.8 MB |
| Classifieds & Local | 1.6 MB | 1.6 MB | 1.2 MB | 2.1 MB |
| Finance | 1.3 MB | 1.3 MB | 1.3 MB | 1.7 MB |
| Media & Entertainment | 1.9 MB | 1.7 MB | 1.4 MB | 2.5 MB |
| Retail | 2.1 MB | 2.2 MB | 2 MB | 2.6 MB |
| Technology | 2.3 MB | 1.9 MB | 1.7 MB | 2.7 MB |
| Travel | 2 MB | 1.8 MB | 1 MB | 1.8 MB |
Pick your industry in addition to location and find your industry standard page size to see if you should optimize the file sizes on your site.
While the average of the values in the table is 1.88 MB, the recommendation for 2018 is to be under 500 KB.
What is the average number of resources?
The resource count is the number of files the browser has to download just to render your page. In addition to the html file, the images, css, scripts, and other files usually add up to a larger number than you’d expect. Each one of these issues a request from your computer to the server, placing strain on both ends.
| Industry | United State | United Kingdom | Germany | Japan |
| Automotive | 119 | 111 | 101 | 168 |
| Business & Industrial Markets | 83 | 83 | 78 | 226 |
| Classifieds & Local | 78 | 86 | 75 | 144 |
| Finance | 84 | 81 | 74 | 163 |
| Media & Entertainment | 95 | 73 | 74 | 129 |
| Retail | 129 | 122 | 177 | 154 |
| Technology | 140 | 113 | 100 | 162 |
| Travel | 105 | 119 | 72 | 182 |
Pick your industry in addition to location and find your industry standard request count size to see if you should eliminate or combine resources on your pages.
While the average of the values in the table is 115.6, the recommendation for 2018 is to be under 50.
What is the average server delay?
Aside from page loading time, TTFB (Time to first byte) also plays an important role in your SEO rankings, as revealed in the Moz event analysis in 2013
We found a clear correlation between a faster time to first byte (TTFB) and a higher search engine rank. While it could not be outright proven that decreasing TTFB directly caused an increasing search rank, there was enough of a correlation to at least warrant some further discussion of the topic.”
| Industry | United State | United Kingdom | Germany | Japan |
| Automotive | 2 sec | 2.3 sec | 2.2 sec | 1.8 sec |
| Business & Industrial Markets | 2.7 sec | 2.0 sec | 2.2 sec | 1.9 sec |
| Classifieds & Local | 2.2 sec | 2.2 sec | 2.2 sec | 1.8 sec |
| Finance | 2.4 sec | 2.1 sec | 2.7 sec | 1.5 sec |
| Media & Entertainment | 1.8 sec | 2.5 sec | 2.2 sec | 1.8 sec |
| Retail | 1.9 sec | 1.9 sec | 2.3 sec | 1.7 sec |
| Technology | 2.1 sec | 2.1 sec | 2.8 sec | 1.6 sec |
| Travel | 2.2 sec | 2.4 sec | 2.7 sec | 1.6 sec |
Pick your industry in addition to location and find your industry standard request count size to see if you should eliminate or combine resources on your pages.
While the average of the values in the table is 2.11 sec, the recommendation for 2018 is to be under 1.3 seconds.
How to compare with your site load time/size/resources?
Now that you know the ideal page load time, size, requests, and ttfb that you should be aiming for, how do you know what yours is?
Luckily there are a few great simple site speed tools out there:
- WebPageTest: The industry standard for measuring site performance – results are collected from real browsers running common operating systems.
- Pingdom: a simple tool which makes makes the same measurements, yet method of testing is undocumented.
- GTmetrix: gives you actionable insights about the best way to optimize your webpage speed.
Any of these tools will give you the numbers you’re looking for, once. Go ahead and enter your url to see your custom values.
It’s good practice to continue checking your stats over time – since your website (and the internet) is constantly changing. If you don’t want to have to set reminders, consider these tools which will automate testing your site daily and send you the results:
- MachMetrics: professional site speed monitoring – schedules tests for your urls from various regions and devices and summarizes the results.
- SpeedCurve: monitor front-end performance
Make sure you’re better than the industry standard
If you know that you’re better than the industry standard load times for 2018, then you’re going to be better than most of your competitors. And we all know that’s super important – a one second delay in webpage time equals a 7% reduction in conversions, 11% fewer page views and 16% reduction in customer satisfaction.
I know what my news years resolution for 2018 is going to be: a faster website!
Thank you so much for your ressource, so helpful.
Just a little remark, I guess loading time for UK “travel” is 10.9 not 1,9s , if we compare server delay, number of ressources and page weight with “technology”
Best,
You’re totally right – updated! Thank you!
Yes Marvin,
you said right.
Could you please specify what connection speed these metrics are at? 3G? 4G? Cable / DSL? Fiber? I appreciate the idea of having benchmarks and targets to hit, but they are essentially meaningless without knowing what connection to shoot for those numbers on.
Thanks!
Ah, from the referenced doc from Google:
“Testing was performed using Chrome and
emulating a Nexus 5 device on a globally representative 3G connection. 1.6Mbps download
speed, 300ms Round-Trip Time (RTT). Tested on EC2 on m3.medium instances, similar in
performance to high-end smartphones, Jan. 2017.”
It says pages should be under 500KB, but this blog post is 575KB 😛
If you ran TinyPNG over the two blog images you’d save 146KB.
Also it looks like you’re using Litespeed Cache, they’ve added some cool optimization features in the newer versions which are worth checking out.
For example, they can optimize images, remove the wp-emoji Javascript, combine/minify CSS/JS assets, add DNS prefetch, and a bunch of other stuff.
Also, the comments section header says “Commments” instead of “Comments”.
Great blog though, reading through all of your past posts and like what I’m seeing! (I might have to give Machmetrics a trial) 🙂
Haha, great points! Sometimes we’re too busy looking at monitoring other sites that we forget to practice what we preach 🙂 Will update.
I am amazed. My blog is dedicated to Indian people and 99% traffic comes from of India only. When I was checking Analytics today, I saw the following report:-
1.Peru….3.11
2.United States…3.96
3.Australia….4.38
4. South Africa….7.81
5.United Arab Emirates….8.60
6.India…26.30
My site loads very slow in India in comparison to other countries. What will be the exact reason behind this? Should I shift to India’s local hosting provider or should I stick to USA based hosting provider? I am using Cloudflare CDN which is Singapore based right now for Asian countries.
Anything you can do to bring your server closer to your users is going to make it load faster. In your case, yes – I would suggest using a host with a datacenter in India if most of your traffic is from there. Check on the datacenter – just because a company is based in a certain location does not mean their datacenter is.
Having a local host in Indian would be your goal number one priority here as you have 99% of your viewer from there. Cloudfare cdn is good if you need to have a balanced faster site for visitors around the globe. Then you can do some manual adjustment to improve performance.
Your server should be closer to your majority users, that will give you immediate latency boost.
cloudflare;s Indian CDN cost is high you have to upgrade & ask them.
otherwise, they will route from France due to cheaper cost high ttfb.
Hello, peruvian here.
Seems like your server is closer to latinamerica.
Try to check for datacenters near you, or even use CDN. It will greatly improve speed.
Regards,
Martin
Seriously great article. I can’t tell you how often we run into people with pretty websites, maybe even well designed ones that are so slow that no one gets to see them. Seriously, if I look at a website with more than a 3 second load time it’s already an eternity. Thanks and keep it up!
I am working on my website and did some investigating on the speed. It is a Shopify site and I discovered that I could get an app that could speed up my site for mobile traffic. It worked out very well but now I am having to find a way to tweak it so it is faster on desktop traffic. Thanks for this article, I enjoyed reading it very much.
Would be interested in the benchmark metric being quoted here: “avg page load time” or “dom timings”. My it guys focus on DOM as the measure of success and yet the AvgPageLoad time from GA is relatively flat.
Hey Todd – the average page load time here used is the “average perceived load time, more specifically the ‘speed index’, which measures how long until most of what you can see within your browser screen is loaded.” The DocComplete time you’re referencing is usually just a bit higher.
my AvgPageLoad time from GA always 10-15 seconds.
no matter how we optimize if users access from slow internet mobile & and also location latency.
dilutes our AvgPageLoad time.
Is measuring a page by the time it takes to fully load reasonable? Not sure. I’m have often happily been reading the page for several seconds or more before it fully loads.
That’s a great question, and the answer is it depends. Some sites need to fully load before they can be used, others like you’ve mentioned just need the ‘above the fold’ content to load to be useful. That being said, even loading the other stuff takes up bandwidth, battery usage, and cpu time.
I’ve spent enormous time improving our ecommerce site to meet benchmark. Had to use server detection libraries to improve performance on mobile. Results went from seconds to 3.4 seconds ! lots of manual work but well worth it. we start seeing some organic ranking improvements as well
That’s great to hear, thanks for making the internet a faster place! Keep it up 🙂
Can you share what retail websites (or the number of them) you have included in this report? I am working on to get some standard page load time (for a retail client) and they want to have some more detail.
Hi. Thank you so much for posting this. I went through the article a few times and would like to ask a couple of questions:
1. Are all the numbers listed, especially for the Average Webpage Times and Load Times, in the article for Desktop or Mobile Web?
2. Where did the numbers come from? Can you please share the methods?
1. Mobile.
2. A report compiled by Google. There’s a link above.
Hi,
My load time is 8.558s I think this is pretty bad on chrome and 7s on mobile what should I do.
Nice post by the way.
Hi,
how fast should blog page load?
Ideally 2 seconds, though anything under 4 seconds is better than most sites around.
These numbers are likely influenced by the classic Pareto distribution:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution
Most sites have terrible load times, but most websites also have basically no traffic.
Is google page speed tool a better way to evaluate the “perceived” website performance? I mean the website images provided under the page speed metrics.
In my opinion, Google PageSpeed Insights gives you good recommendations on what to try (but always test them!), but is not a great way to measure website speed. Its scores have proven to be inconsistent.
After i linked my website to cloudflare the load time reduced from 5s to 1.5 s
but ttfb is too high based on their co-location on every request in the free plan.
overall worth it.
What’s shocking is that Google supplies webmasters scripts that increase site drag quite a bit – Google Fonts and Analytics – and when they pushed everyone to use SSL, it added 250 to 350 additional MS to the load time. PageSpeed Insights is unreliable because they have excluded their own scripts from the results. AMP is a joke that will probably end with Google announcing they no longer support it, just like they do other things they come up with that puts business owners under a lot of stress.
Google sucks. We need a David to come around and knock out this Goliath. Seriously. They don’t own the Internet and they don’t deserve so much of our attention and effort to help them earn more money, which is really what the company is about, ultimately. They’ve proven it time and again that they don’t care about businesses…their time, their effort, their goals – not really.
“PageSpeed Insights is unreliable because they have excluded their own scripts from the results” <- Wow, you're absolutely right. And that's completely misleading. Well said, Mel.
Thanks for the great article, useful in 2019 indeed,
Great article! Are you guys going to create a new one for 2019 too? I’m interested to see if there’s any significant difference between the two years, especially now with these constant algorithm changes.
Thank you for this article!
I have a question: between page size and load time, which one is it better to prioritize?
They typically go together…aim to optimize both!
Great information, can you tell me how could I reduce wait timing?
TTFB can be reduced via server-side optimizations, such as enabling caching and database indexes.
My Sites Load in under 0.7 secs some pages even 0.34 secs
Have a question does implementing ON Page SEO can help you in boosting the website load time.
Good question – typically not. Speed helps with SEO, but it doesn’t work the other way around.
Your server should be closer to your majority users, that will give you immediate latency boost.
Google s AMP project is mobile-optimization on steroids! Essentially, AMP strips down your pages to bare essentials to provide a super-fast loading experience, but also to make content readability a priority. Given how important page speed is, can you muster up the courage to say no to near-instantaneous loading times?
Thank you for the article ,it helped me a lot.
Can you tell me how can I reduce the loading time
Great piece, it helped me to reduce my page loading time and I will bookmark it for sure
I found out that my website is loading too slowly even for 2018 🙁 I think I will have to do something about it. Thank you for clarifying the issue.