By krbaker@hubspot.com (Kristen Baker)

Page load time is a critical metric that influences your entire site’s performance.

Even a few milliseconds can significantly impact the user experience (UX), conversion rates, and, ultimately, revenue that your site drives.

In this post, you’ll learn why your page load speed is important, how it affects your business, and some quick and easy tips to improve your performance.

Table of Contents

• What is website load time?
• Factors That Influence Page Load Time
• What is the average page load time?
• What is a good page load time?
• 11 Page Load Time Statistics

What is website load time?

Website load time — or page load time — refers to how long it takes for a website, or web page, to fully load and appear ‘on-screen’ when a user requests to visit that site.

Or, simply put, it is how quickly the content of a web page is displayed when a user clicks on the site.

Factors That Influence Website Load Time

Website or page speed depends on a wide range of factors.

“Internal” factors such as page elements, file sizes, code efficiency, plugins/widgets, etc can all impact page speed.

Similarly, “external” factors, such as server/host response times, network connections, etc., can significantly impact how quickly a page loads.

But even aside from these, the type of device a user accesses a site from can also determine how quickly the site loads.

According to Jillian Streit, a website strategist at Blue Frog, “Unfortunately, most mobile pages take much longer to load than their desktop counterparts, and mobile users expect pages to load much faster on their mobile devices.”

So, it is essential to carefully consider and optimize all these factors (internal and external) to ensure that your site loads quickly and efficiently.

For step-by-step instructions on how to do this, check out this guide that walks you through measuring and improving page speed and this post that shares 19 actionable website optimization strategies.

What is the average page load time?

The average website load time in 2023 is 2.5 seconds on desktop and 8.6 seconds on mobile, according to a recent report that analyzed over 4 billion web visits.

What is a good page load time?

Although the 2023 study is one of the more recent page load time studies, several older studies have found that much lower page speeds are required to be truly competitive.

For example, a study by Portent found that a load time between 0-4 seconds is best for optimum conversion rates.

For this reason, simply consider the average speed from the 2023 Website Loading Times Report mentioned above as a benchmark or reference point to measure and compare your current performance against the general average across an extensive range of sites.

Case in point, the study also found that only 34% of the top 100 websites (which formed a significant basis …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron