With over half of all web traffic coming from mobile devices, optimizing mobile conversions is now key for ecommerce success. But new research from Google reveals that mobile page loading speeds, which are critical to conversion rates, leave a lot of room for improvement.

Google’s research, which spanned 900,000 landing pages and 126 countries, found that it took an average of 22 seconds to fully load a mobile landing page. This is a huge gap with over half of visitors abandoning a page that takes longer than three seconds to load.

Source: Google/SOASTA Research, 2017.

 A major cause of slow load times is the sheer size of mobile pages, with more than 70% being over 1MB. As an example, a 1.49MB webpage takes seven seconds to load using a fast 3G connection. But according to Google, a few simple changes like “compressing images and text… [can save you] …more than 250KB.”

This reinforces the importance of keeping mobile at the forefront of web design to maximize conversions from the growing share of mobile visitors. For the full set of charts and data, head over to Think with Google blog.