User experience improvements with page speed in mobile search

Thursday, April 04, 2019

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, drop by our help forums (like the
webmaster community)
to chat with other experts.

Posted by Genqing Wu and Doantam Phan