Website performance & speed plays a major role in the success of an online business. High-performing fast sites attract and preserve users better than low-performing ones. In this article, we will particularly look at the average page load time in 2021 and the importance of web vitals.

We usually consider a site fast when its pages load in lesser than 3 seconds. Many people often confuse site speed with page speed grades of performance testing tools, which are actually calculated based on multiple factors of a page including its loading speed.

So when we talk about load time, a good grade doesn’t necessarily mean the page is fast. However, when a page returns a good grade on speed testing tools most of the time the page tends to loads relatively faster than those unable to get better speed test tool grades.

The screenshot below explains that page load time and lighthouse performance scores are not the same, yet they are really close to each other.

With the latest introduction of the Core Web Vital section on GSC + the upcoming Google’s core web vital update, site owners are forced to take note of their website speed and web vitals. Since the news comes out in May 2021, there have been so many speculations about whether not passing the web vitals is going to crush rankings? How to get these matrics right and not mess up? and so on.

Google checks your website load time and they like it as fast with a better user experience. Ever since Google is switching towards “mobile fast indexing” it’s very important for a webmaster to keep the pages very well optimized to maintain visitor’s + search engine satisfaction levels high.

Can’t we think of the site loading speed on a scale where benefits are reversely proportional to the speed? The faster sites get the most benefits and slower sites have the opposite output. Consider bounce rate as a benefit, thus pages that load within 2 seconds have an average bounce rate of 9.6%, which becomes 38%+ for the sites which take more than 5 seconds to load.

Quote: “How fast your website loads are critical but often a completely ignored element in any online business and that includes search marketing and search engine optimization. And that includes page load times on mobile devices: The average time it takes to fully load a mobile landing page is 22 seconds, according to a new analysis. Yet 53% of visits are abandoned if a mobile site takes longer than three seconds to load. That’s a big problem.” Daniel An, Google, 2017

A page that loads extremely fast gives users more control and a stress-free browsing experience. When a page takes ~10 seconds to load it’s obvious that users lose patience and they are more likely to leave the page.

Quote: “40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load”

According to Google SOASTA research, 2017 the probability of page bounce rate increases with increasing page loading time, because it greatly improves the user experience.

The impact of page performance depends on its speed optimization and is reversely proportional. The reverse order of performance is not good for any business. The graph below displays how the abandonment increases along with the increase in page loading time in seconds.

Anonymous analytics data from multiple website sample shows the rate of abandonment can increase by 53% after a website load time reach 3 seconds threshold point.

Important: The bounce rate may also vary depending upon various other factors such as content quality, type of content, website feature and engagements, topic interest, etc.

QUOTE: ‘For every 100ms decrease in homepage load speed, Mobify’s customer base saw a 1.11% lift in session-based conversion, amounting to an average annual revenue increase of $376,789. Similarly, for every 100ms decrease in checkout page load speed, Mobify’s customers saw a 1.55% lift* in session-based conversion, amounting to an average annual revenue increase of $526,147′  (from wpostats, 2016)

The goal conversion rate of a page too shows similar behaviors with an increase in page loading time. The approximate goal conversion rate decreases per 1 second are 0.4 -0.5, according to statistics provided by mPulse.

** Check out our last year’s article on average page loading time in 2020.

Google has made numerous changes in recent years to include user interface as a factor for search engine ranking. It’s been a consistent discussion on the topic of page speed, site security, the structure of the site, etc. It reflects Google’s mission is to have a positive experience for all users.

John Mueller answered “YES” to this question in 2019, “site speed is definitely a ranking factor?” 

And now it’s official that core web vitals will be a ranking factor. Although web vitals don’t directly talk about site loading speed collectively it does satisfy the speed factors with improvements on matrices such as largest contentful paint, total blocking time, first contentful paint, etc.

These web vitals are meant to improve your page’s overall user experience. Not only that, it will benefit your site in terms of ranking once the updates started to roll out.

Core web vitals are modern performance metrics that analyze page speed signals that are crucial to providing a superior web experience. These metrics are highly useful to calculate the “page experience” of a page.

In a nutshell, these are the unified guidance from Google for quality signals that are crucial to delivering a great webpage user experience. Each metrics of the Core Web Vitals are measurable and reflects the real-world experience of a webpage.

Although these are only three matrices they some of the most important aspects of website UX and performance. Simply, it ensures that your site UX is not annoying and load instantly.

Take LCP as an example, which is a single matric that refers to the time taken by a page to paint the essential items on the screen. If your LCP is less than 2.5 sec then you can say additional elements of the page will load fast. Not only that, those matrices that come before LCP will do even better.

Overall Page Speed Insight’s score depends upon all the matrices, but LCP and TBT data do make a great difference on PSI score. Check the calculator image below –

The factors that impact on LCP:

Factors that impact on FID:

Factors that impact on CLS:

Various other factors impact these matrices but the above-mentioned matrices are often considered as key to improving your site’s collective experience. If you can fix these areas of your site then we can say it is well optimized for performance and user experience.

When you get these matrices right that reflects on your Google search console’s web vital and page experience section. Check this image –

👉🏽 Also Read: 5 Best WordPress Speed Optimization Services You Can Hire

Average page loading time varies based on the testing environment. According to GTmetrix average loading time of web pages according to their calculation over 1000+ websites is 7.2 seconds.

Lighthouse says on web pages on mobile devices take an average of 9 – 11 seconds. According to DoubleClick research, the average load time for mobile sites is 19 seconds over 3G connections. 

QUOTE: “From the millions of tests performed using our website speed tests, we found that the average load time for a webpage is 3.21 seconds (on desktop)…What we found was that, unsurprisingly, a page’s load time directly impacts bounce rate….as soon as the page load time surpasses 3 seconds, the bounce rate soars, to 38% by the time it hits 5 seconds!” Pingdom, 2018

The data from backlinko states that the average page takes 87% longer to load on mobile devices vs desktops. It is the direct impact of Time to First Byte (TTFB) which is 1.28 seconds on desktop vs average of 2.5 seconds on mobile devices.

“Fully loaded page” has an impact on the average load time too. As the name suggests, a page can be called Fully Loaded is when 100% of the page’s elements are loaded and all rendered.

So when it comes to fully loaded pages, page size plays an important role in the calculation of average page load time. Most websites hold a great number of assets on their pages and loading the full assets does take time. Higher page loading time for a large group of sites means a rise in average page load time.

This goes the same for a particular website. Take a site where every page takes >8 sec to load then imagine the average page load time for that single site. Now imagine if the previous test were conducted with a stable connection and you still have to test it with a 3G connection as many users still have to use a relatively slower network.

Check this analysis (published on backlinko.com) explains how the full load time of a page are distributed over the assets and their impact on Mobile and Desktop devices.

WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world because of its simplicity. You can make beautiful-looking websites with the support of millions of themes & plugins available. While simplicity is a great advantage WordPress sites often do badly in terms of performance.

Now is that a fault of WordPress? No, as a site owner it’s your job to find the most optimal ways and assets that make your WordPress site faster. Thanks the awesome caching plugins available for WordPress will make your site much faster and make your pages feel lightweight when configured correctly.

Since you have access to these tools/extensions the average page load time of your WordPress should be lesser than 5 seconds max. Think again! as a visitor would you be waiting 5 seconds to load a page after clicking a link?

An optimum WordPress page size should be 25KB. This is obviously very small and realistically, nowadays most WordPress sites serve a lot more kilobytes than that. Even some of the fastest page does hold more data than 1MB but with the correct asset loading strategy, you will be able to achieve