14 DAY TRIAL // "How fast is the web?" is a question many try to answer, but few are in the position to do so. Google, via its Analytics service, has direct access to a huge number of websites in the world, that aggregated data would paint a very accurate picture of the speed of the web worldwide.
Of course, Google doesn't really get to do whatever it wants with that data, but some companies have opted into sharing it with Google for global analysis. Luckily, there's enough of them for Google to provide some very interesting and fairly accurate metrics.
This data is available to all Analytics users, of course, for their site only.
"The new Web Timing standard, which is already implemented by most modern browsers, allows Google Analytics to gather detailed latency data for a sample of requests across a dozen different dimensions," Google explained.
"To see this data for your site, navigate to your Google Analytics account and look for the new 'Site Speed' reports under the 'Content' section - there is no additional instrumentation required on your behalf," it added.
But knowing how fast your site is, without knowing how fast is everyone else, doesn't really tell you that much. Google has put together some data to give you at least a general view on how fast is the web.
The median page load time for desktop websites, as measured by Google Analytics, is about 2.45 seconds. That means that half the pages measured were faster than this, while the other half were slower. The mean page load is about 6.4 seconds.
On mobile, things are significantly slower, the median page load is about 4.4 seconds, while the mean is above 10 seconds.
The vast majority of pages load in 1 to 7 seven seconds on both desktops and mobile devices. Page load times are the smallest in Japan and Sweden, and significantly larger in places like India, Egypt or Kenya.
