Website audit statistics: 21 numbers worth quoting
Every statistic below comes from a named research organisation with a public source you can check. No aggregator round-ups, no numbers invented by a marketing team, no unattributed percentages.
Use them freely. If you cite this page, a link back is appreciated. Last reviewed September 2026.
Page speed and Core Web Vitals
Speed is the single most measurable thing on a website, and the one with the clearest link to revenue.
53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if a page takes longer than three seconds to load.
Source: Google / DoubleClick, 2016
Ecommerce conversion rate falls from roughly 3.05% at a one-second load time to 0.67% at four seconds.
Source: Portent, 2022
Pages loading in one second convert about three times better than pages loading in five seconds, across an analysis of roughly 27,000 landing pages.
Source: Portent, 2022
The Chrome UX Report publishes real-user Core Web Vitals data covering more than 18 million origins in a single monthly dataset.
Source: Google Chrome UX Report, 2024
The Web Almanac analyses Core Web Vitals pass rates each year across millions of real-world pages crawled by HTTP Archive.
Source: HTTP Archive Web Almanac, 2024
Mobile experience
Most audits are run on a desktop. Most visitors are not on one. That gap is where a lot of lost revenue hides.
The average mobile landing page took around 22 seconds to fully load in Google's industry benchmark study — far longer than visitors will wait.
Source: Google (Think with Google), 2017
Mobile and tablet internet usage overtook desktop worldwide in October 2016, the shift that pushed Google to make mobile-friendliness a ranking signal.
Source: Google Mobile Site Speed Playbook, 2016
SEO and organic traffic
Ranking is not the goal. Getting clicked is the goal, and the two have drifted apart.
96.98% of all search clicks happen within the top 10 organic results, based on a study of around 5,000 keywords.
Source: Ahrefs, 2024
The Web Almanac's SEO chapter analyses technical SEO factors — robots.txt, canonicals, structured data and rendering — across millions of crawled pages.
Source: HTTP Archive Web Almanac, 2024
A large and growing share of Google searches end without a click to any external website.
Source: Ahrefs, 2025
Conversion and checkout
Checkout research is the most replicated body of UX evidence there is. Almost none of it is new, and almost nobody applies it.
The global average online shopping cart abandonment rate is 70.19%, from a longitudinal study of 487 websites.
Source: Baymard Institute, 2024
Complicated checkout flows and forced account creation are among the most common reasons shoppers abandon a cart.
Source: Baymard Institute, 2024
Baymard's checkout usability findings are grounded in more than 150,000 cumulative hours of user testing.
Source: Baymard Institute, 2024
Accessibility
Accessibility failures are the easiest audit findings to fix and the most consistently ignored.
WebAIM's evaluation of the top one million home pages found detectable WCAG failures increased 13.6% year over year.
Source: WebAIM Million, 2024
WebAIM scans the top one million home pages with the WAVE stand-alone API, supplemented by site technology and sector data.
Source: WebAIM Million, 2024
The Web Almanac dedicates a full annual chapter to accessibility analysis across its crawled dataset.
Source: HTTP Archive Web Almanac, 2024
AI search and AI Overviews
The audit question has changed. It is no longer only 'can Google crawl this' but 'can an answer engine quote this'.
Google AI Overviews were associated with a 34.5% lower average click-through rate for top-ranking pages compared with similar keywords without an AI Overview.
Source: Ahrefs, 2025
Google has continued to expand AI Overviews into new regions and languages since introducing them in Search.
Source: TechCrunch, reporting Google statements, 2025
The Web Almanac's performance analysis now examines how page speed intersects with visibility in AI-driven search surfaces.
Source: HTTP Archive Web Almanac, 2025
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