Audience Connection Speed
Audience Connection Speed
How fast is the network of a site's real visitors (round-trip time)? Fast fibre or slow mobile? Understand the connection your audience actually browses on. Real Chrome users.
Available for any site with enough real-user traffic in CrUX. Very small sites may show « no data ».
How the Audience Connection Speed tool works
Round-trip time (RTT) is how long a small packet takes to travel to the server and back. This tool shows the typical RTT of a website's real visitors (from Chrome CrUX), which tells you what kind of connection your audience actually browses on.
Why it matters
RTT is about your visitors' network, not your server. An audience on fast fibre forgives a heavier page; an audience on congested mobile does not. Knowing this helps you decide how aggressively to optimise payloads, and sets realistic expectations for your other metrics.
What you can do with it
- Understand whether your users are mostly on fast or slow connections.
- Justify performance work: a slow-network audience makes every kilobyte count.
- Compare the audience profile of different sites or markets.
Frequently asked questions
Is RTT about my server or my visitors?
Your visitors. RTT reflects the recent network conditions of the real people who browsed the site, aggregated by Chrome. It is a property of the audience, not of the site itself.
What is a good RTT?
As a rule of thumb, under about 75ms is fast, 75 to 275ms is typical, and above 275ms indicates a slower or more congested network among your audience.
How can I improve it?
You cannot change your users' networks directly, but you can reduce the impact of a slow one: a CDN close to users, fewer round-trips, smaller payloads and good caching all help most on high-RTT audiences.
Where does the number come from?
From the round-trip-time metric in the Chrome UX Report, based on real Chrome users over the trailing 28 days.
Data: real Chrome users via the public Chrome UX Report (CrUX), trailing 28 days. Free and open, no API key.