Google announced the release of two new mobile benchmarking tools- Google Speed Scorecard and Google Calculator to help mobile sites improve user their end-user experience. The new tools unveiled at Mobile World Congress aim to illustrate why businesses should prioritise mobile speed. The first is a comparison tool and second helps calculate the monetary impact of speed. Google says that most businesses struggle with slow mobile sites often serves as a hindrance to the user experience: “In fact, 53% of visits are abandoned if a mobile site takes more than three seconds to load, according to Google data from 2016.”
The mobile Speed Scorecard helps compare the speed of multiple sites on mobile. The tool taps the Chrome User Experience Report, which features “the largest database of real-user latency data for how Chrome users experience popular destinations on the web.”
Google says thousands of sites from 12 countries can be searched and compared with this web tool.
Meanwhile, Google also detailed the Impact Calculator that quantifies the likely monetary impact based on the site speed. It is designed to show just how much conversion revenue a site is missing out on because of its slow loading speed.
Google says, “A slow mobile site doesn't just frustrate your customers, it can limit your business.” The Impact Calculator’s figures are based off a 2017 report called The State of Online Retail Performance that states a one second delay in page load time leads to 20 percent fall in conversions.
It works by estimating revenue that could be generated by improving the speed of your site. Users can punch inputs like average monthly visitors, average order value and conversion rate and the calculator shows site owners how much can be gained with a change in page load time.
For example, businesses can look at how much they could potentially gain by reducing the load time by two seconds versus one second.
Google has been focusing on the speed for quite a while now. The search engine giant said last month it would start considering website speed for ranking websites in mobile searches. This will be applicable starting July 2018.
