45 Cool Website Load Time and Speed Statistics (2025)

Believe it or not, in the early years of the internet, websites took between one and five minutes to load.¹ That’s extremely slow when compared to the average site load speed today.

For perspective, you may have had time to make scrambled eggs, throw a bag of popcorn in the microwave, and even fix yourself a bowl of cereal before a webpage finished loading.

Today, web hosting infrastructure has changed so much that having a slow website is unacceptable. Here are some website load time and speed statistics to show you exactly how far we’ve come.

The average webpage takes approximately 1.7 seconds to load.² That’s also about how long people are willing to wait to interact with your website. Anything more than that could mean losing visitors to competitors.

The average mobile webpage takes approximately 1.9 seconds to load, similar to desktop speeds.² Mobile has made great strides in load time in the last few years. According to Google, in 2018, the average webpage load time on mobile was 15.3 seconds!³

Getting a spot on Google’s top page for a search inquiry is one of the most coveted achievements on the internet. But this feat can be quite elusive because of the criteria required to get it.

So it’s not shocking that top Google results have some of the fastest speeds on the web. The average page speed of a Google first-page result tops out at 1.65 seconds.⁴

Have you ever visited a website and clicked off right away because of slow loading speeds? Well, studies show you’re not alone.

According to Portent, a slow website is a turn-off for most consumers. Websites that load within one second have the highest conversion rate at about 40%.⁵

Studies show that load time and conversion rates are tightly linked. For each additional second of loading time, the conversion rate decreases.

The conversion rate drops from 40% to 34% over one to two seconds. Anything longer than that could see the probability of conversion drop to 29% or lower.⁵

If your site has a low conversion rate, it’s time to examine your website’s speed and performance for ways to improve.

Hey, we’re not in the ‘00s anymore. Not only has time proved this, but our expectations have as well. While we could wait for painfully slow connections to load in the past, today we all expect a much more seamless experience while browsing, or it’s time to bounce.

A bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors leaving your website without visiting other pages. A high bounce rate could mean your website does not provide value or is too slow (you’ll find this data in your Google Analytics account).

A high bounce rate is not a good sign to search engines, and your rankings will likely suffer. Website loading time can significantly impact your bounce rate and make your visitors want to say Bye, Bye, Bye.

Here’s a little more insight into the impact that page loading speed has on your bounce rate. According to Google, when the page load time goes from one second to three seconds, the bounce rate increases by 32%.⁶

Some web pages take longer to load than others, particularly because of the nature of their industry. For example, websites in the healthcare industry, such as hospitals and insurance, have an average page load time of about 5.6 seconds.⁶

Science may involve the study of light speed, but unfortunately, it doesn’t have enough speed to beat its dreadful bounce rate ratio. As it happens, the science sector experiences the highest bounce rates out of the surveyed industries. About 66% of visits to scientific websites on smartphones result in a bounce.⁷

Every eCommerce site should have a checklist. One of the most coveted factors on that list should always be fast loading speeds.

How fast your eCommerce website loads will determine whether consumers will buy certain products or services. Fast website loads will increase the likelihood of your conversions.

At least 60% of online shoppers expect an eCommerce webpage to load within two to three seconds.⁸ That means you have very minimal time to make a sale. If it takes more time than that to load, they will likely leave the website for a faster competitor — and no one wants that fate.

Pro tip: If your website fails the three-second speed test, consider upgrading your hosting plan or using a content delivery network to boost your site speed. Three seconds could be the difference between making a sale or losing a potential customer.

Companies are constantly in pursuit of the best user experience. And they can all vie for it by first improving performance. Why? Because customers love speedy websites. About 47% of customers expect webpages to load in two seconds.⁹

If the stat above isn’t enough to convince you of the importance of page speeds, this one will. On lead generation landing pages, about one in three visits convert when load times are under three seconds.⁷ Pretty impressive, huh?

Mobile devices have placed a lot at our fingertips, from entertainment to banking. You’re probably reading this from your phone right now. It comes as no surprise that online shopping happens to be one of the top activities consumers do on their mobile devices.

One study found that in the second quarter of 2024, about 77% of shoppers used mobile devices, accounting for 70% of total online orders in the United States within that period.¹⁰

eCommerce has given in-store sales its fair share of competition, racking up billions of dollars from consumer spending. With most of this spending happening from a mobile device, sellers will miss out on billions in revenue without a fast-loading mobile site.

We can see this in the fact that the most successful eCommerce sites greatly value and prioritize load times. The top 10 eCommerce sites in the U.S. average a load time of 1.96 seconds, proving that speed helps beat out competition.⁴

You don’t have to hear Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin’” to know that user expectations have evolved. More than half of mobile users expect webpages to load in under three seconds — or their visits to your site might just sink like a stone.¹¹

Users won’t wait long or virtually at all to get their content these days, especially with so many competitors vying for their attention. In fact, a one-second delay in load time can lead to 11% fewer page views for website owners.¹²

Have you ever entered a store and ended up buying more than you intended? That’s probably due to the store’s clever and seamless layout. You can compare these smart in-store layouts to page speeds in the online user experience.

Of course, a site’s design is incredibly valuable to the user experience. But a site’s speed helps influence whether a user will keep browsing a site even after finding what they initially came to buy. In fact, shoppers visit 8.9 pages when the site’s load time is two seconds, compared to 3.3 pages when the load time is eight seconds.¹¹

Even worse, roughly 40% of your mobile site visitors will jump ship to your competitor if they have a negative experience with your page.¹³

Still don’t believe speed is integral to user experience? Just ask the nearly 70% of online shoppers who say speed impacts their buying experience.¹¹ It’s clear that page loading speeds are a common denominator in a buyer’s choice between your site and another site.

Studies show that 37% of visitors are less likely to return to a site because of slow page loading speeds.¹⁴

So, slow loading times not only affect current metrics but also future ones.

When it comes to speed, desktops have shown to be the superior device in all the land, which is most likely why they have such great bounce rates. In fact, retail site visits on desktop have the lowest bounce rates, meaning users are more likely to stick around for longer while shopping on desktop.¹¹

If you’ve ever visited a site on your desktop and wondered why it loaded faster than on your mobile device, here’s why.

It’s common for mobile devices to load more slowly than desktops. In fact, a study by DebugBear found that the average page load time on a desktop was 1.7 seconds, compared to 1.9 seconds on mobile.

That means web pages load around 11% faster on desktop.²

It may be a good idea to focus on optimizing your mobile responsiveness because mobile devices tend to have much higher bounce rates than traditional computers. The desktop bounce rate is around 30-40%, whereas the mobile bounce rate is 50-60%.¹⁵

Compare yourself carrying 10 bags of groceries inside with carrying one. I’m guessing you’ll get the one bag of groceries inside much faster than the entire haul. This example can help show the difference between the loading times of a webpage and a full website. The lighter object will always win out in speed.

While it takes about 1.7 seconds for a single webpage to load, a full website takes roughly 10.3 seconds¹⁶. This is significantly higher than the time it takes for a single page to load, simply because of the added weight of your entire site’s content.

If you thought a full website on a desktop took a long time to load, you’ll be shocked by this statistic: The average full website load time on mobile devices is 22 seconds.¹⁶

Mobile devices are essentially small computers you can carry in your hand. But since size matters, phones and tablets can have a harder time loading content than desktop computers, due to less processing power and space for RAM and other high-performing hardware.

Who has a need for speed? Well, Google certainly does.

Google made page load speed an official ranking factor in 2010.¹⁷ The search engine ranks websites that are relevant and provide a better user experience higher than sites that don’t.

But if your site serves quality content and you’re still not ranking, it may be time to get those turbocharged engines ready. Looking at solutions for better performance, such as a CDN, should probably be your next pit stop.

Did you know Google looks at around 200 factors when deciding where to rank your website? That figure only emphasizes the gravity of page loading speed on your ranking success. The page load speed is in the top 20 most important ranking factors, according to a study by Backlinko.¹⁸ Page load speed remains relevant in almost every Google ranking factor study.

Top Ranking Factors

MonsterInsights, which offers a Google Analytics plugin for WordPress, considers it the fourth most critical factor.¹⁹

With average speeds of 1.2 seconds, Google knows how to lead by example and ranks as the fastest-loading site on mobile, alongside Naver.com — South Korea’s leading search engine.⁷

If you want to stay on top of your web performance, Core Web Vitals is your resource. Core Web Vitals is the metric Google considers important to a website’s performance and overall user experience — and speed is one of its top factors.

As it happens, about half of all websites pass Core Web Vitals on desktop, but a slightly lower percentage (43.4%) pass on mobile. The web has made great strides in meeting these metrics since 2022, when the passing rate sat only at 39% on desktop.⁷

Introduced in 2020, Core Web Vitals has helped website owners streamline their user experience journey by providing a suite of Google-approved quality signals for webpages.

Core Web Vitals is a set of three metrics that measure real-world user experience for loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability of a webpage, according to Google.

As a matter of fact, these core metrics have proven to work in helping create better websites. Studies show that users are 24% less likely to abandon a site that passes Core Web Vitals, meaning great news for website owners who prioritize its criteria.¹¹

The top 100 most visited websites include Google, CNN, Twitch, and Amazon.²⁰ Though they share having large audiences in common, one thing they don’t share is a passing rate for Core Web Vitals.

In fact, only 34% of the top 100 websites pass Core Web Vitals with flying colors.¹¹ These include Shopify, Amazon, and LinkedIn.

You may not know it, but the digital world would be a less bright and enjoyable place without this one thing: a CDN. This nifty invention is the reason we can binge-watch Netflix without constant buffering, play games without painful lagging, and shop online to our heart’s content.

A content delivery network, or CDN for short, uses edge servers to cache and load web pages faster. A CDN has servers distributed worldwide, so no matter where your site visitors are, they get better speed and performance.

Using a content delivery network, such as Cloudflare, can increase your website’s speed by as much as 72%.²¹ This can lead to a lower bounce rate, higher conversion rate, and better search engine rankings. Sounds like a win-win-win!

It’s not surprising that Google is fast; it is a dominating force on the Internet. Of course, as the grandmaster, it has set the standard for other sites. Its homepage loads in just 1.2 seconds.⁷

If you want to find out how fast a website is, you can use a speed test tool. A simple Lighthouse Audit of your favorite website can tell you how fast it is, including the speed index, first contentful paint, and total blocking time.

Amazon, for example, has a speed index of 1.4 seconds, significantly longer than Google but faster than most websites.²²

In the tech world, most times, the successor gets all the glory, and for good reason. Newer editions typically take old capabilities to new heights, enhancing everything from performance to experience. It’s like trading in your old, trusty SUV for a new, hot ride.

It’s no different in the case of storage drives. HDDs have largely been replaced by NVMe SSDs, allowing websites to get up to 270% faster speeds.²³ These solid-state drives are faster, more reliable, and more performant than traditional HDD drives.

You may be tempted to over-embellish your site, but as the studies show, less is more in terms of speedy websites or webpages. Bulky sites can spell trouble for page loading speeds, as it takes more time to load heavier files.

Examples of heavy sites can include ones with a lot of content or images, such as large WordPress blogs or eCommerce sites. By reducing site size, you can help boost load time by 50%.⁷

Did you know that JavaScript and images are the heaviest content on a webpage? JavaScript typically accounts for 30% of page weight, while images sum up 56% on average.⁷

I did some research and found that good website design requires a few things: consistency in colors and fonts, an attention-grabbing call-to-action, and lots of photos.

Though images are essential, the kind of images you choose also matters. Some of the heaviest content on your website can include large images, which are popular on blogs and online stores.

Optimizing your image files can reduce your website’s overall weight, increasing speed by up to 10%.²⁴ Optimization involves saving the smallest possible file size while maintaining clarity.

While doing research, I came across the lazy-loading technique for images. If this sounds completely foreign to you, I was in the same boat.

But it is a common technique that enables website owners to save about 40 KB per page on mobile, boosting overall mobile responsiveness and speed.⁷ The method involves off-screen image loading, where an image doesn’t fully load until the end user scrolls down to it.

For best practices, Google recommends that the webpage be less than 500 KB to create an optimal page experience.²⁵ You can start by compressing media files and reducing reliance on JavaScript and CSS.

Thankfully, you don’t need to manually modify each image on your site. If you use WordPress, explore plugins that do this automatically. For example, Smush, Imagify, and Optimole are excellent choices.

Half of online users said they would rather miss out on animation and videos in favor of faster loading times, showing that speed is the name of the game for many users.¹¹

Like its physical counterpart, digital pages carry weight. Although you have to stack papers to increase their weight, a single webpage can become bogged down by a variety of things, including images, HTML code, and custom fonts.

Page weight is the biggest factor influencing your website’s load times, followed by the use of a CDN and HTML requests.²⁶ In total, there are roughly 25 factors that make or break your website’s speed, including the length of your JavaScript files and media choices.

Instead of limiting your use of scripts or media files, stick to image optimization and use a CDN to counter less impactful load time factors.

We know heavy pages take longer to load than lighter pages, but exactly how much longer does it take? Studies have shown that light pages load 486% faster than heavy pages.²¹ That’s a significant impact when you look at how speed affects your conversion rate.

User-friendly features add weight to a site but improve functionality and user experience. You must decide for yourself where to strike the balance between a simple, lightweight HTML site and a resource-intensive application.

So that means your website can still be a heavy-hitter in the design department, but float like a butterfly, as Muhammad Ali would say when it comes to page weight.

Pro tip: If your site is bogged down by heavy animations or redundant code, perform an audit to see where you can improve. Reducing your site’s size may be as easy as reworking some poorly written code or deleting an animation that’s not helpful to your user.

Sometimes a webpage’s load time has less to do with its contents and hosting provider, and more to do with the user’s Wi-Fi connection.

The U.S. may be the leader in data centers, but unfortunately, it may need to play the catch-up game with its fixed broadband speeds. If you’re in the U.S., you can expect to get the 6th fastest internet speeds in the world.²⁷

Regions With the Top Broadband Internet Speeds

The United States mobile speed tops out at 287.43 Mbps, compared to Singapore, which comes in with the fastest speeds at 357.52 Mbps.²⁷

The United Arab Emirates is consistent in its approach, also topping the competition for the fastest mobile internet speeds. While the U.S. doesn’t crack the top 10 with 173.80 Mbps, the UAE finishes first with 543.29 Mbps, blowing its competitors out of the water.²⁷

You might be surprised to hear which part of the world has the fastest page loading time. According to DebugBear, the winner is Svalbard — a Norwegian archipelago that lies at the cross-section of the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans.² It may be cold up there, but its web speeds can’t be beat.

The biggest lesson from these website load time statistics is that speed is king. And it is vital in the eyes of search engines whether you want better rankings, a positive user experience, or higher conversion rates.

We’ve also learned that before you blame your website’s design for the slow speed, you should take a look at your web host. The quality of your web host can affect your website’s loading speed. You should conduct thorough research to find the fastest provider for the best results.

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2. https://www.debugbear.com/blog/website-speed-statistics
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21. https://kinsta.com/blog/wordpress-cdn/
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23. https://www.hostingadvice.com/blog/inmotion-hosting-blazes-the-path-for-nvme-drives-in-hosting/
24. https://www.elegantthemes.com/blog/tips-tricks/how-image-compression-affects-your-websites-loading-times
25. https://www.botify.com/blog/page-experience-ranking-factor
26. https://colorlib.com/wp/site-speed-statistics/
27. https://www.speedtest.net/global-index