Fifty of the most popular news web sites take an average of 10.5 seconds to load on a mobile device — more than three times as long as most site visitors are willing to wait, according to a new report by device tracking company DeviceAtlas.
Mobile device uses are willing to wait about three seconds before they abandon a site. Google’s DoubleClick has showed that 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if it takes more than three seconds to load the site.
In its Mobile Web Intelligence Report for the first quarter of 2017, DeviceAtlas looked at the mobile device experience for the 50 largest daily newspapers around the world and assessed their average load time and how data-heavy the page was, which impacts how quickly the page can load. The Wall Street Journal was one of the worst performers, with an average load time of more than 19 seconds. The best news site for performance was Germany’s Die Welt, loading in an average of 2.15 seconds. In general, DeviceAtlas found that publications based in India loaded the fastest (taking about 7.7 seconds) and users in Italy and Spain had to wait the longest: more than 12 seconds on average. The U.S. was in mid-pack, with the news sites tested taking about 10.4 seconds to load on average.
Some context for those numbers: DeviceAtlas conducted the testing on the Nexus 5X (chosen as representative of a mid-range smartphone), using a 1.5 Mb/s network that the company said emulated the “typical experience” on a mobile phone or a “good 3G” connection. If you’re on LTE or Wi-Fi, you’re likely to see news pages loading faster.
DeviceAtlas crunched additional statistics based on its device usage data. It found that Samsung devices lost a significant amount of traffic share, with Samsung losing up to 5% of web traffic share between the fourth quarter of 2016 and the first quarter of 2017. Samsung’s browser is now the third most-used mobile browser, with Chrome Mobile and Safari the leaders.
Other data points included:
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The 5- to 5.1-inch diagonal screen size is now the most-used, which was attributed to the popularity of the Samsung S6 and S7 devices and other mid-range Android devices of the same size.
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The iOS operating system has the largest web traffic share in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Japan; Android dominates in India, Spain, Italy, Germany, Argentina and Nigeria. DeviceAtlas also found that the BlackBerry OS made small but notable in usage in developing markets during the first quarter, including Thailand, Pakistan and Brazil.
The full report is available for download here.
Image copyright: tabitazn / 123RF Stock Photo
