Browsing the web was faster in 2018, Google says

Google yesterday revealed that has measured performance improvements on the web in 2018. For the slowest one-third of traffic, Google saw user-centric performance metrics improve by 15% to 20% in 2018. According to Google, no improvement was seen in 2017, the previous year.

To measure the web performance, Google uses data from PageSpeed Insights audits, and in 2018, there was over one billion PageSpeed Insights audits realized by website owners and developers, for over 200 million unique urls.

Google measured improvements across the whole web ecosystem in 2018. On a per country basis, more than 95% of countries had improved speeds.

Genqing Wu and Doantam Phan, from Google, wrote that when a page is slow to load, users are more likely to abandon the navigation. Thanks to these speed improvements, Google observed a 20% reduction in abandonment rate for navigations initiated from Search.