Consumers have high expectations of mobile sites, which play an important role in their purchase decisions, yet many brands in Asia-Pacific operate sites that meet industry best practice in only two out of five mobile consumer touchpoints.

As a result, brands that do not prioritise great mobile experience risk poor conversions, especially as 53% of consumers will abandon a mobile site if it takes longer than three seconds to load.

These are some of the key findings from a new report, entitled Masters of Mobile APAC Report and published by Google and Accenture Interactive, the professional services firm.

Based on analysis of more than 700 of the most-visited sites across 12 APAC countries, the study also found that conversations drop 20% for every second of delay in mobile page load time.

Google and Accenture tested APAC mobile sites on five benchmarks, or consumer journey touchpoints – findability (how quickly and effectively can users find information?), product pages (how clear is the presentation and call to action?), registration and conversion (is form completion simple and safe?), mobile design and speed/load times.

It was revealed that mobile sites in Asia-Pacific meet industry best practice in only two areas – product pages and mobile design – while lagging way behind on speed.

It emerged that all APAC countries have mobile site load times slower than the recommended three seconds, prompting the report to suggest that “APAC has some catching up to do”.

China has the fastest load time of 5.4 seconds, followed by Singapore and Thailand (7.0 and 7.5 seconds respectively), but several countries have load times of nine seconds or even slower, such as Japan (10.3 seconds) and Vietnam (10.1 seconds).

For those brands keen to improve their mobile site performance, the report recommended that they lighten the load by compressing text and image elements, reducing server response time to prepare for high traffic loads, and avoid repetitive browser requests by caching static objects, such as images and HTML documents.

Sourced from Think with Google, Accenture Interactive; additional content by WARC staff