A review of Internet speeds for different websites reveals that YouTube is the biggest time sapper. Based on data collected across the UK the fastest and slowest sites have been recorded.
The review was performed by a digital marketing agency called E-Innovate, who took the 100 most visited websites in the UK and used Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to find the average (mean) time taken to load the homepage on desktop and mobile.
These tools were used to identify the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) (the load time) of each site on both desktop and mobile. LCP was averaged using the following weighting: Mobile traffic (65%), Desktop traffic (35%). By combining these metrics, the cumulative amount of time users in the UK spend waiting for each website’s homepage to load per year was calculated. Websites were then ranked based on this calculated wait-time metric.
These figures were then used to estimate the cumulative amount of time people spend waiting for each website’s homepage to load per year.
The 10 websites people spend the most time waiting to load
| Rank | Website | Estimated number of UK visitors per year (millions) | Average time taken to load website on desktop and mobile (seconds) | Cumulative number of years spent waiting to load website per year |
| 1. | youtube.com | 1,176 | 5.86 | 218.52 |
| 2. | wikipedia.org | 3,000 | 1.13 | 107.50 |
| 3. | bbc.co.uk | 1,872 | 1.10 | 65.30 |
| 4. | instagram.com | 492 | 4.15 | 64.67 |
| 5. | facebook.com | 564 | 3.36 | 60.09 |
| 6. | x.com | 192 | 6.88 | 41.86 |
| 7. | reddit.com | 564 | 2.06 | 36.84 |
| 8. | amazon.co.uk | 768 | 1.44 | 35.07 |
| 9. | imdb.com | 336 | 2.42 | 25.78 |
| 10. | pinterest.com | 132 | 4.76 | 19.90 |
As indicated above, users spend the most time waiting for YouTube to load. YouTube receives around 1.2 billion visits per year from UK residents, making it the third most visited website in the UK.
Wikipedia.org is the second biggest time-sapper in the UK, with users collectively spending 3.4 billion seconds or 107.5 years waiting for the site to load each year. Wikipedia has around 3 billion UK visitors per year, making it the most visited website in the country.
BBC.co.uk comes thirdwith users spending 2.1 billion seconds or approximately 65.3 years each year, waiting for the site to load. It receives around 1.9 billion UK visitors per year, making it the second most visited website in the UK.
Instagram.com ranked fourth withpeople spending 2 billion seconds, or approximately 64.67 years, waiting for Instagram to load per year. With 492 million UK visitors per year, it is the eighth most visited website in the country.
Rounding out the top five is Facebook.com, with people spending 1.9 billion seconds or 60.09 years waiting for it to load each year. The social media platform receives 564 million UK visitors each year, and is the sixth most visited in the UK.
