49+ Website Load Time Statistics & How to Improve (2025)
Website speed is one of the defining features of website user experience. Waiting for pages to load is a bugbear for most web users. Slow response times make for a clunky and frustrating experience.
It’s also well-known that people have little patience with slow websites. The slower a site performs, the more likely it is a user will just go elsewhere. Website load time is closely linked to abandonment, bounce, and conversion rates. The consensus in web development is clear. If you want a website that gets conversions, make it fast.
In this article, we’ll explore the latest page load time statistics that shape this point of view. And explain how website load time is measured. And we’ll finish by looking at how to improve site speed in numbers.
Top Website Load Time Statistics
- Ecommerce revenues almost double when average page load times drop from 2 seconds to 1 second.
- The average page load speed for a first-page search result on Google is 1.65 seconds.
- The average person spends 5m 57secs waiting for websites to load each day.
- 46% of people will leave a website if it takes longer than 4 seconds to load on a mobile phone.
- 57% of web visits by smartphone users result in a bounce.
- 42% of retail site visits on desktop bounce, the lowest figure of any industry.
- Only 34% of the top 100 websites by traffic pass Core Web Vitals.
- Webpages take 71% longer to load on mobile than on desktop, despite 68% of web traffic now coming from mobile devices.
Core Web Vitals have become a major metric for page load time statistics. You’ll see me refer to these and similar web page load time metrics when they are used in studies.
What Are Core Web Vitals?
The metrics used as Core Web Vitals are:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures the load time of the largest visual element on a website. A ‘good’ LCP is classed as having 75% of page loads under 2.5 seconds.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures the visual stability of a page. Not a time measure, but it puts a figure on unexpected layout changes when you move around a page. A ‘good’ CLS is 0.1 or under for 75% of pages.
- First Input Delay (FID): Measures the delay between a user’s first interaction on a web page to the server processing it. Interactions or inputs mean things like scrolling down a page or clicking a link. FID therefore measures the ‘frozen’ experience users often get when a page first loads. A ‘good’ FID is under 100 milliseconds on 75% of page loads. FID stopped being used as an ‘official’ Core Web Vital in 2024.
- Interactive Next Paint (INP). Replaced FID as the third Core Web Vital metric in 2024. INP measures the latency of all interactions on a page, not just the first one. It’s a better reflection of a page’s overall ‘lagginess’. A ‘good’ INP is under 200 milliseconds on 75% of pages.
Other speed-related metrics often used to measure a website’s loading speed include:
- First Content Paintful (FCP): Like LCP, but measures the time to when the first visible element loads on screen.
- Time to First Byte (TTFB): Measures the time between a client-side request being sent and when the first byte arrives from the web server.
- Time to Interactive (TTI): Measures the time it takes for a page to become fully interactive or usable.
The Impact of Loading Speed on Businesses
1. Ecommerce revenues almost double when average page load times drop from 2 seconds to 1 second. The fastest ecommerce sites with load speeds of 1 second or less have transaction conversion rates of 3.05%. This falls to 1.68% when average page load time increases to 2 seconds.
Here’s an example to illustrate what that means. Say you have a product page for a $50 item. With a one second load time, a 3.05% conversion rate means that page earns $1,525 per 1,000 visits. For a two second load time, a 1.68% conversion rate generates $840 per 1,000 visits.
2. On lead generation landing pages, around 1 in 3 visits convert when load time is under 3 seconds. The fastest pages with load times of 1 second or less get goal conversion rates of 39%. The figure is 34% for pages that load in 2 seconds, and 29% for speeds of 3 seconds. Learn how many marketers use their website to generate leads and sales from our lead generation statistics.
3. For every second a site loads faster, conversion rates improve by 17%.
4. Faster-than-average mobile visits are 41% more likely to convert versus slower-than-average visits. For web page visits on desktop, the difference between faster and slower pages is 19%.
5. A 31% improvement in LCP led to an 8% increase in online sales for Vodafone. They also reported a 15% improvement in its lead-to-visit rate, and an 11% improvement in their cart-to-visit rate.
6. Rakuten increased revenue per visitor by 53.37% and conversion rates by 33.13% by improving Core Web Vitals. It also saw an uplift in average order value of 15.20%, and found that a good LCP score alone can increase conversions by 61.13%.
7. Swappie saw mobile revenue increase by 42% after improving Core Web Vitals. It reduced average load time by 23%, increased LCP by 55% and FID by 90%.
8. Yelp saw conversion rates improve by 15% when it increased FCP by 45%.
9. Agrofy reduced abandonment rates by 76% by optimizing Core Web Vitals. They wanted to tackle sluggish load times for the main images on their pages. Fixing this saw bounce rates drop from 3.8% to 0.9%.
How many websites are created every week? Find out from our website statistics.
The Impact of Load Time on SEO
1. Core Web Vitals are a confirmed ranking factor for Google search results. Improving Core Web Vitals alone doesn’t automatically lead to better search engine rankings. They are just one factor among many that contribute to the overall page experience evaluation.
2. Higher ranking positions in search engines show some correlation with lower LCP. The average LCP for first-position Google search results on desktop is 2.13 seconds. It’s 2.18 seconds for position 10 and 2.2 seconds for position 20. The differences are very small and all top 20 search positions meet the ‘good’ LCP benchmark of 2.5 seconds. You can find out how to keep track of your positions with rank tracking tools from our SEO rank monitoring guide.
1. The number of websites passing Core Web Vitals is rising. In 2022, 39% of websites passed. Latest figures from 2024 show 50.5% of websites pass.
2. The average page load speed for a first-page search result on Google is 1.65 seconds.
3. In an analysis of search visibility, slow domains ranked 3.7 percentage points worse than fast domains on average. Websites were classed as ‘slow’ if they failed to meet the benchmark standard in any Core Web Vital.
The Impact of Load Times on User Behavior
1. The average person spends 5m 57s waiting for websites to load each day. That adds up to 1.5 days a year.
2. When a website passes Core Web Vitals thresholds, visitors are 24% less likely to abandon during loading.
3. 46% of people will leave a website if it takes longer than 4 seconds to load on a mobile phone. When a mobile website loads in 1 second, just 7% of visitors leave. This almost double to 13% when load time increases to 2 seconds.
4. Mobile users are 123% more likely to abandon an ad landing page that takes 10 seconds to load versus one that loads in just a second. Abandonment probability jumps 32% for load times between 1 and 3 seconds. And 90% between 1 and 5 seconds. Find out the average conversion rate of landing pages from our landing page stats. You can use that knowledge to build high converting page with the best landing page builders.
5. 45% of people say they are less likely to make a purchase from a slow-loading ecommerce site. 37% are less likely to return to a slow website. If you’d like to build a fast ecommerce store, you can check out the best ecommerce platforms to find the right one.
Bounce Rates by Industry and Device
1. 57% of web visits by smartphone users result in a bounce. This is the highest figure of any device type. For tablet users, the bounce rate is 52% and on desktops it’s 50%.
2. The science sector sees the highest bounce rates. 66% of visits to science websites on smartphones result in a bounce.
3. 41% of retail site visits on tablet bounce. This is the lowest figure of any industry.
4. Retail sites top the number of pages per session with an average of 5.25 on desktop. Retail also tops the average pages per visit on mobile (4.14) and tablet (4.85).
5. The sports industry gets the most web sessions per year, with 187 million on mobile devices alone. The finance industry gets the most sessions on desktop with 105 million.
6. 63% of law, government and politics websites pass Core Web Vitals on desktop, the highest figure for any industry. The worst-performing industry is travel, where just 39% of sites get a ‘good’ score.
7. Law, government and politics sites also have the fastest average LCP with 1.93 seconds.
8. Travel is the only sector to fail to get a “good” average LCP (2.65 seconds).
9. The fastest average INP speeds are found on family and parenting websites (91.47ms). Travel websites are again the slowest (142.65ms).
Website Load Time Statistics of the Top 100 Sites in the World
1. Only 34% of the top 100 websites by traffic pass Core Web Vitals.
2. 56% of the top 100 websites are not meeting Google’s ‘good’ standard for user experience on desktop. These sites include Facebook, X/Twitter, Booking.com and Pinterest.
3. 65% of top 100 sites fall short of the ‘good’ standard on Core Web Vitals on mobile. Those that do perform well on mobile include Shopify, Amazon and LinkedIn.
4. Top 100 website homepages perform better than whole sites. 7 homepages have 99/100 on CWV performance, including Facebook. The X/Twitter homepage topped the charts with a perfect 100. Find out how long it took for Twitter and Facebook to get 1 million users and how they compare to ChatGPT from our ChatGPT statistics.
5. Discord is the fastest Top 50 website by traffic. Its average page load speed is just 0.8 seconds.
6. Google and Naver.com are the fastest-loading websites on mobile, with average speeds of 1.2 seconds. Google is also the world’s largest website by traffic.
7. The slowest site in the top 50 websites on mobile is Apple.com. It averages a page load speed of 15.6 seconds on smartphones.
Mobile vs Desktop: Average Load Times
1. 68% of web traffic now comes from mobile devices and only 30% comes from desktop.
2. Webpages on mobile devices take on average 71% longer to load than on desktop.
3. The average page load time across the top 100 websites in 2024 is 2.5 seconds on desktop and 8.6 seconds on mobile.
4. The average page load speed across the top 50 websites in 2024 is 2.8 seconds on desktop and 3.2 seconds on mobile.
5. 53% of websites pass Core Web Vitals on desktop, versus 48% on mobile.
6. 75% of sites deliver LCP in under 2.5 seconds on desktop, versus 62% on mobile.
7. The fashion industry has the fastest website load times. Fashion websites average 1.1s load times on desktop and 3.2s on mobile. Property websites also have average desktop load times of 1.1s. But mobile load speeds average at 4.2s.
8. The slowest page load speeds by sector are found in recruitment. Recruitment websites load in 3s on desktop and 12.7s on mobile. The slowest websites on desktop are construction sites, averaging load speeds of 3.3s.
How to Improve Website Load Speed
Reduce page size
1. The average site built on WordPress has grown 34% (measured in megabytes) since 2016. Larger images, videos, animations and adverts add kilobytes to a web page. This extra ‘weight’ slows download speeds.
2. The 2 ‘heaviest’ elements on a web page are images and JavaScript. Images make up 56% of page weight on average. JavaScript accounts for 30% of page weight.
3. Reducing the number and size of images on a web page helps to improve LCP.
4. Using compressed file formats like WebP can reduce image size by 34%.
5. Lazy loading images can save more than 40 KB per page on mobile devices. On mobile, the most common technique is ‘off-screen’ lazy loading. This means an image isn’t loaded until a user scrolls down and the image is on screen.
6. 27% of websites use the HTML loading attribute to delay loading of images. This figure has more than doubled since 2021.
7. JavaScript is used to create dynamic webpage features like forms, menus and animations. But big or overly complicated scripts can be slow to load and hurt Interaction to Next Paint (INP).
8. The average JavaScript script consumes 3.3s of boot-up time per mobile page. On desktop, the average figure is 0.5s.
Upgrade infrastructure
9. Using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) can boost site speed by up to 30%. CDNs create content caches in geographically distributed servers. When a user lands on a site, the content doesn’t have as far to travel. Nor does it have to be processed from scratch by the host server. Combined, these benefits reduce latency and increase load speeds.
The type of hosting you choose also directly affects page speed. Shared hosting is the most common and cheapest type of web hosting. It involves sharing server resources with other websites. VPS and dedicated hosting plans provide resources for your use only, and so achieve faster speeds and better consistency. Cloud hosting splits resources on demand from various servers at once. This again maintains high speeds even as traffic and resource demands change. For small, ‘lightweight’ sites, shared hosting can still deliver fast speeds. But if you want to use more images, video or complicated scripts, upgrading your hosting plan becomes more important.
Did you know that 79% of marketers include email in their top 3 marketing channels? Find more important email marketing statistics, marketing automation stats, and CRM statistics here.
Sources
The Impact of Loading Speed on Businesses
1-2. Portent “Site Speed is (Still) Impacting Your Conversion Rate” (2022)
3. Bidnamic “How loading speed impacts conversion rates” (2024)
4. Propellernet, “The Impact of Speed on Ecommerce” (2020)
5. Web.dev “Vodafone: A 31% improvement in LCP increased sales by 8%” (2021)
6. Web.dev, “How Rakuten 24’s investment in Core Web Vitals increased revenue per visitor by 53.37% and conversion rate by 33.13%” (2022)
7. Web.dev “How Swappie increased mobile revenue by 42% by focusing on Core Web Vitals” (2021)
8. Yelp, “Boosting user conversion with UX performance wins” (2021)
9. Agrofy, “How Agrofy optimised Core Web Vitals and improved business metrics” (2020)
The Impact of Load Time on SEO
1. Search Engine Journal, “Are Core Web Vitals A Ranking Factor?” (2023)
2. WattSpeed & Advanced Web Ranking, “Does performance matter?” (2024)
3. WattSpeed & Advanced Web Ranking, “Core Web Vitals Study 2022” & “Does performance matter?” (2024)
4. Backlinko, “We Analyzed 11.8 million Google Search Results. Here’s What We Learned About SEO” (2024)
5. Sistrix, “Core Web Vitals is a Measurable Ranking Factor” (2021)
The Impact of Load Times on User Behavior
1. Illustrate Digital, “Illustrate Digital’s Global Page Speed Report 2024”
2. Chromium, “The Science Behind Web Vitals” (2020)
3. Statista, “How long are you willing to wait for a single webpage to load on your mobile phone before leaving the site?” (2024)
4. Google, “Find out how you stack up to new industry benchmarks for mobile page speed” (2018)
5. Unbounce, “Think Fast: The Page Speed Report” (2018)
Bounce Rates by Industry and Device
1-5. Google “Benchmarking Data”
6-9. Wattspeed, “Does performance matter?” (Jan 2024)
Website Load Time Statistics of the Top 100 Sites in the World
1-4. ToolTester, “Website Loading Time Statistics (2024)”
5-7. Illustrate Digital, “Illustrate Digital’s Global Page Speed Report 2024”
Mobile vs Desktop: Average Load Times
1-3. ToolTester, “Website Loading Time Statistics (2024)”
4. Illustrate Digital, “Illustrate Digital’s Global Page Speed Report 2024”
5. Wattspeed, “Does performance matter?” (Jan 2024)
6. HTTP Archive (March 2024)
7-8. Illustrate Digital, “Illustrate Digital’s Global Page Speed Report 2024”
How to Improve Website Load Speed
1. Illustrate Digital, “Illustrate Digital’s Global Page Speed Report 2024”
2. Debug Bear, “Is Reducing Page Weight Important For Website Speed?” (2023)
3. Semrush, “Core Web Vitals: What They Are & How to Improve Them” (2024)
4. Google, “WebP Compression Study”, (2024)
5-6. HTTP Archive, “State of Images” (March 2024)
7. Semrush, “Core Web Vitals: What They Are & How to Improve Them” (2024)
8. HTTP Archive, “State of JavaScript” (March 2024)
9. VentureHarbour, “How Installing a Content Delivery Network (CDN) Improved My Site Speed by 30.2%”, 2023