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2013 predictions: The average web page will hit 2MB, Android will pull ahead of iOS for good, and your smartphone will get infected with a virus

11 Dec 2012

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It wouldn’t be December without a batch of audacious predictions for the new year. Assuming we all survive past December 21st, here’s what I think 2013 will hold for site owners, mobile users, CIOs/CTOs, RUM vendors, and the browser wars.

1. The average web page is going to hit 2MB.

A year ago, I predicted that the average web page would hit 1MB in 2012, which it did in May. Today, the average page is 1280KB. In a post I wrote last month, I predicted that, at the current rate of growth, typical page size would hit 2MB in early 2014. I’m upgrading that prediction to the end of 2013. Call it a hunch. This has massive implications for site owners in terms of bandwidth, but mobile users will be hardest hit, from both a usability perspective and a throttling/data cap perspective.

2. By the end of 2013, at least half of all North Americans will own a tablet.

Currently, 29% of North Americans own some kind of tablet. With the proliferation of new inexpensive tablets, with the emergence of kids as a mostly untapped tablet market, and with Christmas just around the corner, I’m predicting that more than 50% of North Americans will own a tablet by year end.

3. Global mobile traffic will hit 25% of total internet traffic.

Right now this number is 13%, but numbers are surging in China and India.

4. 25% of online shopping will be via mobile.

With the explosive adoption of tablets, we’re going to see a major jump in mobile shopping. Mobile phones and tablets represented 24% of online shopping on Black Friday, up from 6% just two years ago. We’re going to see that Black Friday stat become the norm.

5. 2013 will be the year your smartphone gets infected with a virus.

You know it’s coming. Cue the dark lords of anti-virus software to the rescue.

6. Android will pull ahead of iOS smartphone adoption. For good.

In five years, we’re all going to look back on 2013 as the year Android pulled ahead for good on smart phones. When it comes to this kind of call, I use the Strangeloop team as the canary in the coal mine. My dev team is moving to Android en masse. I haven’t seen this type of shift since 2009 when the mass exodus from Blackberry began.

7. Mobile performance will continue to be a major problem.

Mobile sites will remain too slow. Too many people still believe that their simplified mobile site is the answer (which it’s not, because it’s often too simple), or that responsive web design is the answer (which it’s not, because RWD pages can actually be even bigger and slower than a typical page). There’s no single magic bullet for mobile performance. Companies are going to have to really apply themselves to finding solutions that work for their unique situations.

8. This will be a great year for Chrome, an okay year for Internet Explorer, and a bad year for Firefox.

Internet Explorer will halt the bleeding and stabilize, but not grow, its market share. Chrome will hit 45% of worldwide browser market share by the end of the year — almost entirely at the expense of Firefox.

9. Two of the four largest CDNs will be acquired and integrated into larger companies.

I’m not naming names, and I have no inside information. This is just my hunch that we’re going to see big changes in this market.

10. Netflix will continue its decline, while Amazon video delivery will ascend.

Amazon’s rise in video delivery to the home will become evident in 2013. Amazon can outspend almost anyone for content — and when it comes to video, content trumps all.

11. DDOS attack mitigation will dominate the enterprise.

There’s nothing CIOs/CTOs hate more than visible failure. Sixty-five percent of the top ecommerce sites will have a mitigation strategy in place by the end of 2013.

12. RUM vendors will finally start to make money.

Real user monitoring will move from the sideshow to the main stage for half of analytics vendors. We’ll even see the first example of actionable RUM, which operations can use to trigger alarms that matter. Operations will start to trust RUM. By year end, RUM will be found on 35% of ecommerce sites.

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What we learned from testing the mobile load times of 200 top retail sites over 3G and LTE

3 Oct 2012

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Earlier today, I had an exciting opportunity to present some of the findings of Strangeloop’s newest study, the 2012 State of Mobile Ecommerce Performance at Velocity EU. I’ll be posting those slides shortly, but first want to take a moment to talk about this study and why we’re so excited about it.

Why test over cellular networks?

Last spring, we were sitting in the office talking about mobile performance measurement and why it’s so hard to get reliable real-world numbers, especially over cellular networks. This seemed like a glaring knowledge gap, but it’s an understandable gap given the massive variability in network performance. Last year, I did an informal latency survey and found that latency can fluctuate wildly, even in the same location at the same time.

3G latency

Methodology: How to DIY your own RUM tests for mobile

So we set out to develop a reliable methodology for measuring mobile performance over cellular networks, which takes this variability into account. We also wanted to create a methodology that anyone could recreate fairly easily.

Here’s how we did it:

  • We focused on 200 leading retail sites, as ranked by Alexa.com.
  • We selected six testing devices: iPhone 4, iPhone 5, Samsung Galaxy S smartphone, Samsung Galaxy S3 smartphone, iPad 2, and Samsung Galaxy tablet.
  • iPhone 4, Galaxy S, iPad 2 and Galaxy tablet were tested over 3G.
  • iPhone 5 and Galaxy S3 were tested over LTE.
  • We tested each site’s home page 30 times per device, using the device’s native browser. By testing this many times and capturing the median result, we hoped to take into account latency variability.
  • For all tests, the devices were positioned in the same location, in an attempt to mitigate the latency impact caused by location changes.
  • For all tests, wifi was turned off, devices and radios were at full power, and screens were not allowed to lock during testing.
  • The tests in this study were conducted using a RUM beacon inserted into the page that captured the onload time. The cache and cookies were cleared automatically between each test.

The results

As I shared at Velocity, the results were a mix of the predictable and the surprising:

Predictable: Pages are slow over 3G.

It’s not that shocking to learn that the median pages took 11 or more seconds to load over 3G.

Surprising: A significant number of pages took 20+ seconds to load.

While we expected pages to be slow, we didn’t expect that 9% of the pages we tested took more than 20 seconds to load on the iPhone.

Predictable: LTE was faster than 3G.

No explanation needed here.

Surprising: LTE was only 27% faster than 3G.

I’ve heard claims that LTE is, on average, ten times faster than 3G. Our results suggest that LTE performance gains might be more unpredictable than this.

Predictable: Pages loaded 22% faster on the iPad than on the Galaxy tablet.

iPad fans might scoff that we even bothered to test this.

Surprising: The Galaxy S3 phone loaded pages 9% faster than the iPhone 5.

It’ll be interesting to hear what iPhone fans make of this. (Full disclosure: I have an iPhone 5 and have to admit I was kind of affronted to see these results.)

Check out our infographics of the report’s highlights, below, and I encourage you to read the findings for yourself. If you have any questions about our findings or approach, don’t hesitate to ask.

Load times of 200 leading retail sites on mobile devices over 3G and LTE networks

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Can the new iPad deliver on its performance promise? Five things to consider before answering that question

7 Mar 2012

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Speed matters, and the folks at Apple know this. The new iPad 3 is expected to deliver faster performance via a (rumored) boosted Apple A5X mobile processor. As reported by Tech Crunch, “Apple states that the A5 SoC is ‘twice as fast’ as the Tegra 3 and the A5X offers ‘four times the performance.’”

But at the end of the day, it’s still a mobile device, hampered by many of the same constraints as smartphones, from battery power management to touchscreen lag to flaky browser cache. It’s also hampered by fast-growing user expectations. The average tablet user doesn’t think of their device as being a big-screen smartphone. Instead, they view it as a leaner, meaner laptop.

So the big question is: Out in the real world, can the new iPad truly deliver a satisfyingly fast user experience? It’s not a simple question to answer.

A few things to consider when you think about the iPad and performance:

1. iPad users are more similar to desktop users than they are to smartphone users.

In January, I dug into data spanning hundreds of millions of desktop and mobile transactions and found that iPad users are more similar to desktop users than they are to mobile users.

Desktop vs mobile browser: boounce rateWhile iPad users view somewhat fewer pages per visit than desktop users (4.54 versus 5.14, 5.17, and 6.13), their average time on site and bounce rate were commensurate with the desktop crowd. Not a huge surprise. What’s interesting here is that, even though iPad performance lags behind desktop, iPad users seem willing to stick around for a longer desktop-like experience.

2. When sites are really slow, iPad users are as impatient as smartphone users. But when sites are really fast, iPad users are less impatient than smartphone users.

This is a really interesting dichotomy. Here’s an animated slide I created for Velocity EU last fall to illustrate this pattern in iPad users versus iPhone and Android users:

When things are really slow (as in page loads of 20+ seconds), iPad users bounce at about the same rate as Android and iPhone users. But as speed improves, iPad users tend to stay and their bounce rate gets dramatically lower — around 5% compared to 8% for iPhone users and 11% for Android users.

This is especially interesting given what we now know about conversion rates for iPad owners versus other mobile owners. (For example, over the Black Friday weekend, shoppers using iPads converted at a much higher rate than other mobile consumers, 4.6% vs. 2.8% for users of all other mobile devices.) Clearly, keeping your iPad traffic happy is a priority.

3. When it comes to generating page views, iPad trounces other mobile devices.

Again, no big surprise here. But it’s still interesting to see iPad’s growing dominance visualized, as in this animated graph depicting mobile traffic on a Strangeloop customer’s site over the course of two years:

You can see the seminal moment at the end of 2010 (right after Christmas, when it seemed like half the people in the western world suddenly had iPads) when iPad surged past iPhone and Android. While iPhone and Android made significant gains over 2011, page views via the iPad more than doubled — from less than 300K to more than 700K — in just one year.

You can see the same scenario play out over a much more compressed time frame in this next animation, which shows the adoption of an extranet application for another Strangeloop customer, a Fortune 500 company that had just launched a new internal app. Over just six weeks, you can see the mobile devices all starting out mostly neck and neck. Page views for the iPad slowly but surely lead the pack until week 5, when suddenly the iPad leaps ahead, leaving other devices in its dust.

In my opinion, this is just the beginning of the tablet’s dominance. It’s a no-brainer. The average person wants to see more content on a bigger screen.

But while people may embrace tablets, the tablet faces the same performance challenges as other mobile devices…

4. 3G performance is up to 10X slower than throttled broadband service.

As I mentioned above, most iPad users are browsing on their sofas. But many are not, and these folks are getting hit by brutal network slowdowns. Four months ago, I tried a quick-and-dirty approach to real-world mobile speed testing and found that latency can hit 350ms on a 3G network. It wasn’t pretty.

3G latency graphIf you’re experiencing latency of up to 350ms on a page with 50 resources, that’s a whole lot of load time. Given the fact that iPad users (and tablet users in general) expect a desktop-like experience, this lag time is painfully unacceptable.

But network performance is just the first half of the problem…

5. 97% of mobile end-user response time happens at the front end.

About a year ago, I revisited Steve Souders’s four-year-old stat that says that about 80% of end-user response time occurs at the front end, and made a surprising discovery: while this number has remained pretty much the same for desktop response time, the front end is where a whopping 97% of mobile response time happens. What this means for tablet owners: When they aren’t struggling with network issues, they’re challenged even further at the browser level. It’s one uphill battle followed by another uphill battle.

Where does this leave site owners?

Tablets are one of the most exciting innovations to hit the market in the past ten years, and Apple is definitely leading the charge. But you can’t have innovation without a few headaches. Site owners are faced with the challenge of creating sites that work on three types of devices: desktop computer, tablet, and smartphone. These sites need to look good, load quickly, and contain enough functionality and content to satisfy demanding visitors. At the same time, they need to respect bandwidth limitations and bow to the fact that mobile network throttling is on the rise.

How are site owners going to do this? There’s no single answer. The solution lies in embracing a diversity of strategies, from responsive design to infrastructure investment to mobile-specific CDNs (to, of course, front-end optimization). It’s going to be an interesting few years.

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2012 predictions: The average web page will hit 1 MB, Google and Siri will face off, and Chrome, Windows 7, and RUM will rise

20 Dec 2011

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It wouldn’t be December without an avalanche of predictions for 2012. Here’s my contribution.

1. The average web page will surpass 1 MB in size.

Between December 2010 and now, the average web page grew from 716 KB to 965 KB, according to the HTTP Archive. That’s 30% growth in slightly less than one year. This kind of growth is the norm, as pages have grown at a rapid rate since 1995, when the average page size was just 14.1 KB. It’s pretty safe to assume that this growth will continue. We’re going to see sites grow by at least another 30%, taking them well over the 1 MB mark — a number that would have blown our minds 10 years ago. The main culprits: images (which account for more than half of the average page size) and third-party scripts like analytics, ads, and social sharing widgets.

2. Site owners are going to demand more transparency and control over third-party content and scripts.

As the graphs above show, scripts are the fastest-growing area of page growth. In just one year, scripts have grown by 50%, from 115 KB to 172 KB on the average page. As I wrote here a couple of months ago, the average top e-commerce site contains seven third-party scripts, with some sites containing up to 25 scripts. These can have a serious impact on page performance. Poorly optimized third-party scripts can slow down page load by several seconds or even stall it completely.

Currently, most third-party script providers don’t offer real-time monitoring of their scripts, nor do they offer meaningful service level agreements (SLAs). As site owners become increasingly educated about the importance of page speed, they’re going to start demanding that scripts be properly optimized to either load asynchronously (or better yet, load after document onLoad). They’re also going to demand better monitoring, reporting, and accountability from script providers.

3. Chrome will become the dominant browser.

For the past year, we’ve seen Internet Explorer and Firefox slowly dropping in popularity, while Chrome’s popularity has been rising steadily. Right now, IE is still dominant, and Chrome just passed Firefox. Chrome’s success is well deserved. It’s fast, clean, and comparably glitch-free. With Chrome set to unite with Android, which is as much a semantic merger as a technical one, we’re going to see Chrome’s numbers climb sharply.

4. Windows is going to surprise us on mobile.

Everyone thinks it’s an iOS/Android world, but that could all change when we see Windows 7 embedded in the next wave of Nokia devices. I recently had a chance to play around with a Win7 device, and it was pretty slick (which, coming from a die-hard iPhone user, is saying a lot). Remember how Internet Explorer blew Netscape out of the water back in the ’90s? Windows 7 might not be a game changer to quite that extent, but we’re going to see it become a contender in the mobile universe.

5. Mobile consumer behavior will continue to evolve as mobile users’ expectations grow.

Marriott recently reported that 47% of their mobile bookings happen on the same day as check-in. This implies an important paradigm shift among mobile user behavior. Clearly, these users have developed the expectation that they can book on demand and on the go. Mobile users expect 100% availability and quick response. There’s zero “try again later” mentality. They won’t return to a poorly performing site — they’ll bounce to another site that can give them what they want immediately. We’re going to see more of this type of behavior, and site owners are going to have to adjust to the fact that mobile users are even more demanding than desktop users.

6. Companies will focus internally on mobile development.

As I mentioned in this piece on O’Reilly Radar, the 2011 holiday shopping season has proven that the mobile web is no longer a curiosity. Rather than keeping mobile on the sideline, in 2012 companies will grow their mobile teams, and these will eventually match the size and scope of their regular development teams.

7. Amazon Silk is not going to spark a browser revolution.

As I also mentioned in the O’Reilly interview, while Silk offers a performance boost for some tablet content, even its own product manager, Brett Taylor, says of tablet browsing, “It’s not meant to process and crunch a lot of heavy data.” I’ve written many times about the difference between basic versus advanced content optimization. Basic optimization techniques – such as those embedded in Silk – can actually slow down, or even break, pages. Web pages are becoming even more complex, data-intensive, and dynamic. Because of this, advanced content optimization – which takes a big-picture approach to accelerating the entire site — is increasingly emerging as the only reliable way to optimize sites without causing harm.

8. Google and Siri could begin a long face-off.

Google has become synonymous with search, and it would require a massive paradigm shift to dislodge them from this position. Siri has the potential to be a formidable contender. By taking users completely out of keyword-entry mode, and by focusing on local search, Siri is incredibly attractive to mobile users, who are often task-oriented and on the move. But it all comes down to results. Google became dominant in search because it delivered the most relevant results, and it delivered them fast. If Siri can do the same – and to be blunt, right now Siri kind of sucks — then it’ll be interesting to see how Google responds.

9. Companies are going to start shining a spotlight on internal application performance.

2010 and 2011 marked the years when companies realized how important site speed was for their e-commerce sites. Now that everyone has internalized the fact that faster pages equal more revenue, they’re going to take this insight and apply it to their internal web-based applications. There are a lot of studies, dating back as far as 1968, showing that employees can radically increase their productivity — in some cases by more than double — when computer response time is improved by just 2 or 3 seconds. But very few companies did anything with these findings. We’re going to see a renaissance in this kind of research, and we’re finally going to see companies aggressively pursue improving internal performance.

10. The CDN market is going to become a lot more competitive.

Until recently, whole site acceleration or dynamic site acceleration (DSA) was a big-ticket solution offered by one company. Now there’s a growing selection of competitive products backed by innovative companies offering newer technology and, ultimately, faster sites. Unlike the price wars that happened in the video delivery marketplace a few years back, the added value will keep prices and margins at reasonable rates (nothing like the usurious rates currently being charged). The big winners here are going to be savvy site owners, who could see their bills reduced, and their service quality go up.

11. Real user monitoring will make performance testing accessible to smaller, “mortal” companies.

Performance testing is challenging. When synthetic tests (sometimes called backbone tests) were first developed, they came with a pretty major price tag, which meant they could only be embraced by site owners with deep pockets. With the recent proliferation of affordable, quality real user monitoring (RUM) tools, site owners will be able to finally get real insight into their visitors’ behavior — at a decent price.

Agree? Disagree? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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Three kinds of web page test visuals, and the best ways to use them

6 Oct 2010

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With Black Friday around the corner (or happening right now, if you want to jump the gun), what kind of performance blog would this be if it didn’t subject a bunch of leading ecommerce sites to some uncomfortable scrutiny? Continuing in the vein of last week’s TechCrunch post, I wanted to take this opportunity to share more ways to present performance data in a way that is clear, meaningful and compelling.

But first, a bit about this set of tests…

When choosing subjects, I turned to this Bloomberg article on the top 20 ecommerce sites of the 2009 holiday shopping season. Their list takes into account traffic numbers, online sales data, and a consumer survey that ranked sites based on criteria such as ease of use, value, variety, and customer service. I ran a bunch of tests using Webpagetest, focusing on time to interact (aka the amount of time it takes for the document to be loaded and fully interactive) and time to start drawing (aka the amount of time it takes for meaningful content to appear).

Let’s look at three different approaches to presenting the resulting data.

1. Rows and rows of numbers

Website Time to interact Time to start drawing
Amazon 5.142 3
Target 10.843 9.5
Walmart 8.672 7
Best Buy 5.843 4
Apple 7.815 4.5
Overstock 7.012 2
Barnes & Noble 13.818 7.5
eBay 3.559 3.5
Crate & Barrel 8.187 4.5
Zappos 4.569 2
Piperlime 6.731 6.5
Red Envelope 7.558 7
Williams-Sonoma 9.202 4.5
Banana Republic 8.855 7
Nordstrom 6.288 8
QVC 5.441 4.5
Newegg 9.258 2.5
Kmart 11.517 5.5
Toys’R'Us 11.238 13
Buy 10.451 9.5

Four observations about these numbers:

  1. The disparity between time to start drawing and time to interact was considerable in many cases. For instance, if you focused just on Newegg’s 9.258s time to interact, you’d judge it to be one of the slowest sites. But in actuality, Newegg started to display meaningful content at 2.5 seconds, making it one of the fastest, according to that metric.
  2. Having said that, about one-third of these sites didn’t display any meaningful content until the page had almost fully rendered.
  3. And two of these pages — Toys’R'Us and Nordstrom — didn’t deliver meaningful content until AFTER the document was complete.
  4. Tables are a really underwhelming way to present compelling information.

Would you have made observations #1-3 based solely on looking at this table? Probably. Would everyone in your organization take the same amount of care in scrutinizing these numbers? Probably not.

When to use tables: Tables are a way of showing that you’ve done your homework and tabulated your data. While necessary in the appendix of a performance report, they’re not the most effective way to light fires under butts.

Now let’s look at another way of seeing the same data.

2.  Bird’s eye view: One image to rule them all

Web page tests for 20 ecommerce sites

You’ll want to enlarge this image to take it in. It’s a set of timelapse slideshows showing how the page elements loaded in 0.5s increments for each of the same 20 sites.

What’s great about this image is that it doesn’t need a lot of verbiage. You can see what you need to see in one quick glance:

  • Lots of screens = bad
  • Lots of empty white screens = really bad
  • Screens that populate early = good

This kind of visual sells the value of performance tuning more than any table of numbers ever could. If you’re in the process of benchmarking your site and doing a competitive analysis, I strongly recommend you generate an image like this one. (It’s easy to do using Webpagetest’s visual comparison feature. First, run your side-by-side test, then click the “Export filmstrip as an image” text link on the bottom of the results page.)

When to use a bird’s eye view graphic: In the competitive analysis section of your performance audit.

And now let’s look at a really dramatic way to compare site speed.

3. Side-by-side video

In this case, I chose the fastest and the slowest pages from the list of sites above, in terms of how quick they were to start drawing.

When I show clients how their sites perform compared to their competitors, this kind of visual is always a showstopper. I mean, which site would you rather own?

When to use a video: To kick-start a presentation or lead a performance report.

Five major takeaways from this exercise:

  1. Always analyze your site’s performance from the perspective of real users.
  2. Benchmark yourself outside your industry. If you’re a shoe retailer, you don’t just want to know how your site compares to other shoe retailers. You also need to know how your site compares to other ecommerce sites your visitors are likely to shop at. Collectively, these sites are helping create the performance standard.
  3. Load time is not the best metric for judging your site’s perceived speed.
  4. If you’re forced to serve object-laden pages, serve your most meaningful content first.
  5. When you’re presenting performance data to stakeholders in your organization, remember that different people respond to different kinds of visuals. Graphs work for some, videos for others. Cover all your bases in order to make sure your audience gets the visuals that work best for them.

*All tests conducted on Webpagetest — IE7 on DSL via the server in Dulles, VA.

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