Three seconds. That's how long a mobile page gets, according to research Google published in 2017. After that, 53% of mobile site visitors leave (Daniel An, Google).

Count it out loud. One, two, three. That isn't long to show a stranger who you are.

Where the numbers come from

The figures come from an article by Daniel An, Google's Global Product Lead for Mobile, called "New industry benchmarks for mobile page speed". It was published in February 2017 and reported research by Google and SOASTA. The original Think with Google page now redirects elsewhere, so we're linking to the AMP project's republication of the article, which carries the same figures.

Three numbers stood out to us.

The first is the 53%. Over half of mobile visitors leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load.

The second is the average. In the same research, the average mobile landing page took 22 seconds to fully load. Twenty-two seconds, against a three-second window.

The third is the slope. As page load time went from one second to seven seconds, the probability of a mobile visitor bouncing went up 113% (AMP blog). That's more than double.

Why speed is part of your brand

When you think about your brand, you probably think about the logo, the colours, the photos and the words. All of that lives on your website, and all of it is invisible while the page is still loading.

So the first thing your website does for a visitor isn't showing them anything. It either makes them wait or it doesn't. Someone who taps your link from an Instagram bio or a search result has no idea yet how good your work is. They only know the screen is blank, and the back button is right there.

Heavy things slow a page down. A full-screen video on the homepage. Huge photos uploaded straight from a camera. Lots of fonts, scripts and widgets, each one asking the phone to fetch something else. Each might look lovely on its own. Together, on mobile data, they can leave a visitor staring at a white screen while your competitor's page has already loaded in another tab.

The honest caveat

These numbers are from 2016 and 2017, and average load times have improved since then. We'd be misleading you if we presented 53% and 22 seconds as today's figures, so please don't quote them that way.

What hasn't changed is the basic deal. A slow page asks a stranger to wait for you before they know whether you're worth waiting for. And your visitors aren't always on fast Wi-Fi. Some are on a train with one bar of signal, in between two other things. Your site has to work for them too.

Speed is also something you control. You can't make a visitor more patient, but you can make the page lighter.

One thing to do this week

Take your phone, switch off Wi-Fi so you're on mobile data, and open your website as if you'd never seen it before. Count to three.

If the page is still blank or half-loaded, make a short list of what's on it: the hero video, the size of the images, any pop-ups or embedded feeds. Then ask whoever built your site (or look in your website builder's settings) about compressing images, swapping an autoplay video for a still image on mobile, and removing anything that isn't earning its place.

You can also run your homepage through Google's free PageSpeed Insights tool. It gives you a score for mobile and desktop and a list of what's slowing the page down. Some of the suggestions are technical, but the image ones are usually easy to act on.

Then do the same test on your contact page, since that's where a visitor goes when they're ready to talk to you.

So, open your site on your phone right now. Is it still loading at three?