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For web designers and tech enthusiasts, the end of March 2021 is infamous. It marks the day that Google finally (after a series of delays) turned the established hierarchy of web UX and SEO on its head with 3 words:
The milestone event signaled a new era in the digital world — one where search engines prioritize mobile user experience over its web-based counterpart. This makes sense. Over the past 7 years, mobile usage has dethroned desktop, increasing from 31% of global web traffic in 2015 to 59% today.
Google’s switch to mobile-first indexing ensures that users receive a quality browsing experience on mobile. It also brought a host of best practices for online businesses looking to maintain their position on the SERPS and prevent traffic loss.
Conventional Marketing Wisdom: Higher Mobile Load Time = Less Organic Traffic
A key source of traffic loss, according to many in the digital marketing space, is slow page speed. Also known as mobile load time, this metric lets you see how quickly a web page will load on a mobile device. It’s measured in seconds, and lower results are typically seen as better.
In 2017, Google conducted a study to assess how bounce rate impacts mobile load time. Here’s what they found:
It paints a pretty bleak picture for brands that aren’t able to reach the lofty 1 second load time. And it gets worse:
A 2018 Google Report clocked the average mobile load time across all websites at 15.3s.
While this data is out of date by over 4 years, we’ve made huge strides in the availability of LTE, WiFi, and site-building technology since that time.
And yet, the recommendations surrounding desired mobile load time haven’t changed. Maintaining organic traffic with a sub-3 second load time (and as close to 1 as possible) is still preached as gospel. The question is, does this still apply to the B2B SaaS industry today?
As part of our research on marketing excellence in the tech space, we analyzed the relationship between mobile load time and organic web traffic for 446 top SaaS companies. Before we get into the surprising results, here’s how we measured mobile load time.
PageSpeed Insights and Mobile Load Time
To approximate a company’s mobile load time, we used the mobile performance score from Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool (previously Lighthouse). This weighted average incorporates numerous loading speed metrics that provide, in Google’s view, a “balanced representation of the user’s perception of performance.”
The PSI performance score is on a hundred-point scale that breaks down as follows:
- Good: 90-100
- Needs improvement: 50-89
- Poor: 0-49
These scores correspond to the ranges of time that browsers and operators can expect as the approximate mobile loading time for a site:
Providing users with quality mobile experience has been a top concern for companies across all industries, but there’s a lack of up-to-date data to inform SaaS marketing departments on the impact load time has on organic traffic. With the PSI performance score as our independent variable, we assessed how mobile load time impacts web traffic for brands in the SaaS sector.
The results might surprise you.
Data from 446 Top SaaS Brands Shows a Very Weak Relationship Between Mobile Load Time and Organic Traffic
The plot below shows a weak relationship between mobile load time and organic traffic. With an R² value of 0.02927 and a value of 1 representing a perfect connection, the data shows there is almost no relationship between the two variables.
Essentially, there’s little evidence to support the claim that mobile load time is integral to organic traffic flow in the SaaS industry.
One would expect a robust relationship between organic traffic and Google’s mobile page speed performance score, as it is the most comprehensive single metric for mobile page speed. But we see the opposite.
Just look at the average scores for both the general and outlier segments:
| SaaS Industry Segment | Average PageSpeed Performance Score | LCP Time |
| General Industry* | 19.32 (Poor) | > 4,000 ms |
| BRICK Top 25 | 24.39 (Poor) | > 4,000 ms |
Out of 446 SaaS companies, only 18 fit the middling “Needs Improvement” category during Q1 2022, putting their mobile load time between 2.5-4 seconds. Interestingly, only one of the top 25 companies we researched — Cloudflare — made it into this category.
The remaining SaaS brands (including the other 96% of the companies we researched) all have a PSI performance score in the “poor” category with an estimated mobile load time of 4+ seconds. And there’s a surprising number of highly successful companies with scores at the lower end of the spectrum: HubSpot, Adobe, Smartsheet, and SEMRush to name a few.
Keep in mind that this is preliminary data. Our journey to uncover the relationship between mobile load time and organic traffic in the B2B SaaS space is just beginning.
What we are left with now are more questions than answers. Mainly — what does this all mean? Well, for the time being:
Mobile Load Time isn’t the Be-All and End-All of SaaS Marketing Success
For the Foundation Team; it also means the hunt for an explanation is just beginning. There are plenty of potential reasons behind this apparent disconnect between mobile load time and organic traffic in the SaaS industry. For instance:
- B2B SaaS customers may be more likely than the general public to work from desktop devices rather than mobile ones
- Frequent updates to the PageSpeed Insights API and overall Google algorithm may have influenced the relative importance of mobile-first
- The rise in popularity of SaaS brands (particularly in the past few years) offsets any deficiencies in their mobile sites
These findings do bring into question the narrative that mobile performance is paramount to success in the B2B SaaS marketing space. What they do not completely dispel is the importance of mobile load time overall (even within the industry). UX is still key to success.
Our quarterly, subscriber-only SaaS reports will continue investigating the relationship between mobile load time and organic traffic for SaaS brands.
