This is an interactive report to explore network latency on the web. It addresses questions such as: What is the current health of the network? How does it vary by country and website categories? It uses Round-Trip Time (RTT) data from Chrome UX Report (CrUX).
RTT shows the time it takes for a request to go from a client to the server and back (round-trip). In CrUX, it is estimated on the initial page load navigation using navigator.connection.rtt and measured in milliseconds. CrUX provides 75th percentile (p75) aggregated for all domain visits during the past 28 days.
RTT is a diagnostic metric that helps you to understand your audience network connection. Instead of relying on 2G, 3G, or 4G labels (which are also based on RTT), it provides better visibility to your visitors' connection. For example, if your site's average RTT is slow, performance metrics like TTFB or LCP are also likely to be impacted. Consider loading some parts of your site conditionally (learn more). But if RTT is fast and you still have slow metrics, you need to optimize your site. We tried to define fast & slow buckets on the map below. To measure your site's performance, use our free Site Speed Test.
Methodology: we took RTT data for the top 50,000 domains aggregated during December 24 (excluding empty values, which resulted in 49,543). Here are the median (p50) values by device type:
Usually, 70% of a website's traffic is mobile, which explains why the All Devices value is closer to Mobile than Desktop. The table below provides a detailed breakdown of the RTT distribution with percentiles and statistics:
Let's explore RTT by country. The regional difference is clear and reflects countries' GDP and the location of data centers. Australia and New Zealand famously experience higher RTT due to speed of light limitations, as data centers are primarily located in the US and Europe. We computed regional RTT using top-level domains (TLDs). For example, .nl represents the Netherlands, and .ca is Canada.
The map below displays the median RTT (p50). And the table on the right lists the top 10 fastest and slowest countries. You can interact with the map and use the device switch to change aggregation.
The network latency varies up to 50% by website category. Sectors like E-commerce or Auto-industry tend to invest more in web performance, resulting in lower RTT. In contrast, categories like Entertainment or Adult content, are much slower. To classify websites, we used Chrome's topic classifier (chrome://topics-internals/). Below is an interactive table to explore the network latency across different clusters of the web:
Next: This is the first iteration of the report. We plan to expand its functionality once more RTT data is available in CrUX. Feel free to contact us via Email or Twitter and suggest your ideas and improvements.