Google: Web pages bigger but web speed faster

In their second annual Site Speed Report, Google reveals that desktop and mobile users now enjoy a faster web experience. The company says this increase in speed is thanks to "significant improvements in the core infrastructure that powers the Internet".

While web speed via desktops has improved very little, in light of web pages increasing in size by 56% during the same period it's an achievement.

However, web speeds via mobile have increased significantly more - 30% compared to last year. That takes the average browsing speed on mobile down from just over 10 seconds in 2012 to just over 7 seconds today.

By country, Japan and Sweden are the fastest on both desktop and mobile while China is losing speed on desktops but gaining significantly on mobile.

In 2011, Google introduced a tool, the Site Speed report, that measures page load times across a website, providing owners with an easy way to see which pages could be tweaked to perform better.

As well as measuring the page load time across a website the Site Speed report also displays which are the slowest loading pages, whether visitors from different geographical regions are experiencing different loading speeds, and whether a site loads faster or slower for different browsers.

Once slow-loading pages have been identified the Site Speed tool can be used to view the effects of any optimization.

Tags: analytics, Google, load times, mobile web, site speed, web page