For years, Google has been trying to encourage digital marketers and website administrators to improve their mobile site speed and user experience. Google research has shown that roughly 53% of mobile site visits are cancelled if a site takes more than three seconds to fully load.
The search engine giant recently announced the release of two new tools that should make the process of optimising mobile site speed even easier.
Google’s Mobile Scorecard and Impact Calculator both give marketers essential data and important visuals that can motivate stakeholders to invest in improving mobile site speeds.
Mobile Scorecard
According to Google’s best practices guidelines, mobile sites on a 3G connection should fully load within five seconds, while sites on a 4G connection should become fully usable within three seconds. If you are not sure how fast your mobile site is loading, you need the Mobile Scorecard.
The Mobile Scorecard compiles Chrome user data to compare the speed of thousands of mobile sites across 12 countries.
To use the Scorecard, you simply enter a site’s URL. Start with your own, including competitors’ sites later on. The tool will compile and rank each URL in a list that shows the speed of each site. It gives a clear, concise picture of not only your mobile site’s average speed but also how it stacks up against your closest competitors.
Impact Calculator
The Impact Calculator uses data from a 2017 report called The State of Online Retail Performance, which found that conversions could decrease as much as 20% for every second of page load delay. Using these figures, the calculator is able to show how revenue is impacted by slow page loads.
Users can enter key metrics like average monthly mobile visitors, current site speed and conversion rates to see how load time impacts income.
The output is accompanied by a slider that makes it easy to change values for comparison. You can see how much conversions could be affected by a faster or slower load time, for example.
Conclusion
Google’s new mobile site speed tools highlight the growing importance the internet giant is placing on the mobile user experience. The Mobile Scorecard lets you see how your current site speed stacks up against the competition, while the Impact Calculator makes it easy to show financial decisionmakers and stakeholders the monetary impact of a faster mobile site.
