New global benchmarks from Google of average site speed

Does your site pass the 2,4,6,8 second rule?

Value: [rating=4]

Recommended link: Google Analytics Benchmark

Our commentary on site speed variation

We’ve shown through several recent posts that speed matters if you want to maximise conversion. The Walmart example in our previous post showed how conversion rate drops dramatically below 4 seconds, so this is a good rule of thumb in evaluations.

Today, Google has released a new compilation that helps companies compare their performance to this.

It has 3 different benchmarks:

1. Site Performance by platform

This supports the data from our previous post - suggesting that desktop sites need to render in less than 4 seconds:

Google notes that you can check out the site speed reports in Google Analytics to see how you compare. Remember that averages across the whole site can be deceptive and monitoring key pages can be important.

2. Site Performance by country

This is interesting since there is quite a variation into a fast lane of countries where the mean load time is less than 6 seconds and a slow lane on the "Internet superhighway" (I know, no one uses that term).  I was surprised that South America, Africa and APAC are significantly slower reflecting the infrastructure and browsers used in these countries:

The geo-breakdown shows the pattern nicely: important if you have many users in these countries:

3. Site Performance by industry

The final breakdown is less interesting since it shows similar levels across sectors, but useful for comparing against your sector. News sites seem to struggle to keep up with others - down to the need to maximise revenue per page through loading many ad units I think:

Smart Insights download speed

Finally, this seems a good point to mention, as some of you reading this may have noticed, that on Wednesday PM this week, this site was significantly slower than these benchmarks due to a problem with our hosting service or rather hackers targeting one of the sites on their servers. Although the site was still available, the latency made it unusable for several hours. So, we’re sorry if this gave you problems in accessing our posts or resources.

As we’ll explain in our Enewsletter to members, we have had good availability > 99.99% since we switched hosting providers in September and relaunched the new site in December. However, there was a denial of service attack against our hosting providers servers and we had to sit it out or rather Stu, our CTO had a big job helping the hosting company isolate and fix the problem. In educating myself about solutions to protect against DDoS it seems that there is no robust solution, even if you have a large budget for hosting. I noticed also that yesterday, some larger sites like the Home Office, MI6, CIA, FBI and NASA were targeted by a DDoS for different reasons completely. It's a problem that seems to be on the rise and DDoS extortion is often not reported because companies want to keep it quiet.