The Internet’s World Wide Web has gotten faster in the past year thanks to improvements in core network infrastructure, 4G LTE mobile deployments, faster Web browsers, and greater processing power of mobile devices, according to Google Analytics.
Updating a study of the speed of websites around the world completed last year, Google found “significant improvement in page load times on mobile,” with Web access via mobile devices some 30% faster year-to-year.
Growing “at an incredible rate,” the mobile Web experience “is about 1.5x slower than the desktop experience,” according to the Google Analytics team.
Though not as large, mean and median Web page load times for desktop computers also decreased, which, according to Google Analytics’ Arvind Jain and Mustafa M. Tikir “is still impressive given that the size of the web pages have increased by over 56% during this period.”
Google Analytics’ study is based on one week of aggregated Site Speed data on the speed of websites from opt-in Web publishers in 23 countries around the world. Google’s Site Speed service and reports afford website publishers “detailed data on the speed of their web pages as experienced by real users.”
There are numerous and varied links in the website delivery chain that have an impact on overall speed and performance, Jain and Tikir note while examining and comparing national and other aggregated site Speed data. “The browser, the network connection, the client hardware (processing power), the content of the web page, and the hosting location of the web site relative to the user all impact the speed of an individual page load.”
