User experience improvements with page speed in mobile search

To help users find the answers to their questions faster, we included page speed as a ranking factor for mobile searches in 2018. Since then, we’ve observed improvements on many pages across the web. We want to recognize the performance improvements webmasters have made over the past year. A few highlights:

• 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.
• We observed improvements across the whole web ecosystem. On a per country basis, more than 95% of countries had improved speeds.
• When a page is slow to load, users are more likely to abandon the navigation. Thanks to these speed improvements, we’ve observed a 20% reduction in abandonment rate for navigations initiated from Search, a metric that site owners can now also measure via the Network Error Logging API available in Chrome.
• In 2018, developers ran over a billion PageSpeed Insights audits to identify performance optimization opportunities for over 200 million unique urls.

Great work and thank you! We encourage all webmasters to optimize their sites’ user experience. If you’re unsure how your pages are performing, the following tools and documents can be useful:

1. PageSpeed Insights provides page analysis and optimization recommendations.
2. Google Chrome User Experience Report provides the user experience metrics for how real-world Chrome users experience popular destinations on the web.
3. Documentation on performance on Web Fundamentals.

For any questions, feel free to drop by our help forums (like the webmaster community) to chat with other experts.

Posted by Genqing Wu and Doantam Phan