Comparing the difference between surfing 10 years ago and now, do you think the Internet speed is faster except for the convenience brought by moving from the PC to the mobile phone? In fact, from 2010 to 2019, Httparchive.org has recorded page loading times for 6 million popular

The high-speed and smooth network has always been a "firm need" for every Internet surfer. Comparing the difference between surfing 10 years ago and now, in addition to the convenience brought by moving from the PC to the mobile phone, do you think the Internet speed is faster?

Recently, an article "How much time do we waste waiting for websites to load?" claimed that network lag is still an unsolved problem. Today's network is not faster than the network ten years ago. It even mentioned that because of the Internet speed, it may have wasted 27 life in the world.

Have you ever thought about how much time would be wasted on web page loading in the era of Internet acceleration?

1. Today's Internet speed = Internet speed 10 years ago?

Looking back at the first ten years from 2022, only in 2014, 2018 and after 2018, the median of the network loading speed was less than 6 seconds. Internet speeds have begun to stagnate since 2019.

In fact, from 2010 to 2019, Httparchive.org has recorded page loading times for 6 million popular websites. Data from this decade shows that median loading time has not improved for web pages accessed from desktop computers, and website speeds in 2019 are not much faster than before 2010. Meanwhile, the internet speeds on mobile devices are worse, with more than doubled loading times.

(Photo source: datafantic screenshot)

2. Netizens called out: "Irony! At this moment, 1 GB of optical fiber is only loaded..."

On Hacker News, the article has also been teased by many netizens:

• "Just like although the computer is getting faster every year, my computer does not seem to run faster";
• "not only the loading time, but the time to read content has also become longer";
• "The network throughput is increasing, but the latency has not improved (although 5G wireless ratio 4G LTE has been greatly improved)”;
• “I hope that crappy websites will not become more bloated every year”;
• “Is it because WebDAV is not mature yet”.

Therefore, rather than saying that everyone is concerned about the problem of Internet speed, it is better to say that everyone actually cares about the time wasted due to speed, and doubts that the development of Internet technology has not solved the problem of slow website speed.

3. 1.0 seconds less can improve the experience

. Chapter 5 of the Usability Project published in 1993 mentioned the basic suggestions on response time, which is roughly the same as now: 1.0 seconds is the limit on the user's thought flow, even if the user notices the delay. Typically, no special feedback is required during delays exceeding 0.1 but less than 1.0 seconds, but the user does lose the feeling of directly manipulating the data. In fact, the impact of users on website abandonment and conversion due to slow web page loading has been proven many times in the past: in 2009, both Google and Bing reported that even if the loading time was delayed by half a second, it would lead to a significant reduction in conversion metrics (search times and revenue per user); in 2010, Mozilla experiments found that shortening the page loading time by 2 seconds increased the conversion rate by 15%; in 2011, Gomez reported 150 million views of 150 websites, and found that pages with a loading time of 6 seconds were 25% more likely to be abandoned than pages loaded within 2 seconds; in 2016, Google found that if the web page loading time exceeds 3 seconds, 53% of mobile visits would end; in 2017 In 2018, Akamai summarized data from 17 retailers (7 billion views) and found that pages loaded in 2 seconds had the highest conversion rate; in 2018, BBC found that 10% of users would leave for every additional second of page loading time. In life and work, although it is impossible to accurately calculate how much time we spend on loading web pages, today's use of the Internet to obtain information, entertainment, etc. is indeed much more than 10 years ago. Perhaps, the delay of only 1.0 seconds at this moment is enough to change your experience of reading this article. What do you think?