Yes, the internet is speeding up — or at least, Google thinks so. The search giant has published a report on the aggregated site speeds gained from consenting Google Analytics users, which shows that despite the fact that webpages have increased in size, they are loading faster — especially on mobile devices.
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The findings are an update on a similar report from last year where Google studied the page load times of websites around the world using the accumulated site speed data from opted-in web publishers using its Analytics service. It compared this to new data to show that the web is now loading faster. Mobile speed and processing power has increased considerably — it is now 30% faster than last year, where it was 1.5 times slower than desktop browsing. While mobile grew in leaps and bounds, desktop speed only improved slightly. But it’s still an overall improvement, as the size of the average web page has increased by 56% in the last 12 months.
Google suggested that the increase in speed is due to improved browsers, more powerful mobile devices as well as an increasing amount of LTE/4G networks worldwide.
When it comes to country by country speed, Google’s report found that users in Japan tend to see the fastest page load times, followed by Sweden, Poland and the United States. With desktop browsing, Japan and Sweden are at the forefront, followed by Canada and the U.S.
