mobile

Web performance and the 2012 US election: Is site speed an early indicator of future success?

1 Feb 2012

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According to this Mashable post, Barack Obama and each of the Republican candidates’ all claim to be pretty pro-technology, with strong anti-SOPA and anti-PIPA stances. I wanted to see if this pro-tech stance extends to web performance, so I decided to take a shallow dive into their websites and mobile strategies. I was actually kind of surprised to see some interesting patterns emerge.

1. Website speed correlates (mostly) to position in the primaries.

When you stack these numbers side by side, you see a rough relationship between site speed and recent primary results. At 46.4% and 31.9%, respectively, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich led the Florida primary. Interestingly, both also lead when it came to site speed. Gingrich’s site is fastest, with a load time of 7.7 seconds (maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to laugh at his plans to colonize the moon), while Romney’s loaded in 9.3 seconds. Rick Santorum and Ron Paul lagged in both areas, trailing far behind in votes and suffering load times of 10.7 and 13.5 seconds, respectively. (Interesting to note: President Obama’s site fared worst of all, with a load time of 13.6 seconds.)

How fast did websites load for Republican candidates?2. None of the candidates’ sites rose to the challenge of designing for mobile devices.

At recent Velocity conferences and elsewhere online, I’ve emphasized that one-third of mobile users want to access a site’s full content, not just a stripped-down “mobile” version. At the same time, there’s no doubt that making a full site usable on a mobile device is a major challenge — a challenge that none of the candidates rose to. Romney is the only candidate to serve a mobile site, which, to his credit, did link to the full site. The other candidates all deliver their full websites to mobile.

Mitt Romney has a mobile-optimized website

Given how tech-savvy President Obama’s people were throughout his first campaign, it’s not surprising to see that, with his new campaign site, they’ve adopted responsive design principles. Depending on whom you ask, responsive design is the savior of cross-platform development. Done well, it allows content to adapt to a variety of devices — desktop, tablet, and smartphone — maintaining content and design integrity while respecting the constraints of the device. (Here’s a longer review of the President’s new site and whether or not it serves as a good example of responsive design in action. I didn’t experience all the problems the reviewer did, so I’m wondering if they’ve since been fixed.)

3. Mobile experiences ranged from poor to terrible on Android over 3G.

I visited each of the candidates’ sites using two mobile devices and networks: my iPhone over wifi, and a borrowed Android over 3G. While all the sites loaded within 10-20 seconds on my iPhone, their performance on the Android via 3G ranged from slow to unbearable. Romney’s site was fastest, at 21 seconds, but it failed to size properly (see below) in the browser. The full sites for Gingrich, Santorum, and Paul each took several minutes to load.

MittRomney.com - mobile-optimized site on an Android device

4. On every site, the primary call to action — donate — was either lost or ineffective for mobile users.

On all the non-optimized sites, the “Donate” button was lost on the screen. Romney’s mobile-optimized site made it easy to find the “Donate” button, but on the Android it kept generating an error message saying there was a problem with the security certificate — not something a potential donor wants to read right before handing over their credit card information.

Spot the call to action on these non-optimized pages

Why should web performance matter for presidential hopefuls? (Hint: It’s about democracy)

It’s one thing to tout your pro-technology stance to curry favor with voters, but there are a couple of obvious, self-serving reasons to walk the walk when it comes to your web presence: it makes it easier for you to reach more people, and it makes it easier for your supporters to, you know, support you. Candidates may not care about this beyond the lip-service stage right now, but a few things to bear in mind down the road, when campaigning really heats up:

  • 25% of Americans who have mobile devices use mobile exclusively. This means 1 out of every 4 voters expects to be able to access the full site via their device.
  • According to the source in the point above and to this report from Pew Research, many members of the mobile-only group are technology late adopters, skewing toward older people and those with lower incomes. These groups have traditionally been heavily targeted by Republican candidates.
  • By the same token, people with lower incomes are more likely to be users of Androids and non-iPhone devices, and more likely to access the internet via 3G.
  • Only 28% of smartphone owners use an iPhone, according to Nielsen. Having a mobile site optimized only for iPhone users is like slamming the door on almost three-quarters

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By: Josh Bixby Category: Mobile, Page speed tests Tags: , , ,

Advanced Mobile Optimization: How does it work? How do we measure success? [slides]

27 Jan 2012

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It’s been a busy couple of weeks, but I finally got around to posting the slides from my talk about advanced mobile optimization at the San Francisco & Silicon Valley Web Performance Meetup.

Advanced Mobile Optimization: How does it work? How do we measure success?
View more presentations from Strangeloop

I always enjoy coming to these Meetups, and this time was no exception. Thanks again to Aaron Kulick for inviting me, to LinkedIn for hosting, and to the extremely keen and knowledgeable crowd who turned out. :)

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By: Josh Bixby Category: Mobile Tags: , , , , ,

Interesting new findings about page views, time on site, and bounce rate across desktop and mobile browsers

20 Jan 2012

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Last month, I talked with Mac Slocum at O’Reilly Radar about mobile performance, and he asked me a couple of interesting question:

  • Are mobile users more or less tolerant of delays than desktop users?
  • Are users of one type of system more accepting of delays than users of another?

These questions are a gateway to a fascinating area of research, because they lead into a topic that we all have pet theories about (i.e. Chrome users are more tech savvy than the average person, while Internet Explorer users are less) but have little statistical evidence to back up.

I told Mac that I planned to do more digging and report back, so here I am.

Methodology

  1. I took five e-commerce sites (full sites, not mobile versions) that Strangeloop is currently accelerating and pulled their entire transaction volume over the past month — totaling hundreds of millions of unique visits via desktop and mobile. While desktop transactions outnumbered mobile transactions, the mobile numbers were still statistically significant: the smallest set of mobile numbers comprised around 200,000 unique visits and the largest set comprised about 20 million unique visits.
  2. I extracted the following data: page views, time on site, and bounce rate.
  3. I sorted the data into the following browser/OS groups: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, iPad, iPhone, and Android (phone).
  4. I calculated the averages for each metric and browser.
  5. I graphed the numbers and looked for trends. Some interesting patterns emerged:

Desktop vs. mobile performance: average pageviewsDesktop vs mobile performance: average time on siteDesktop vs mobile browser performance: average bounce rate

Three Key Findings

Finding #1: Internet Explorer users consistently view more pages, spend more time on site, and have a lower bounce rate than Firefox and Chrome users.

The average number of page views for IE users was 6.134, as opposed to 5.17 for Firefox users and 5.14 for Chrome users. IE users spent between 30-45 seconds longer on the site than other users, and their bounce rate was lower by 5 or 6 percentage points — a pretty significant difference. Could all of this substantiate the belief (among non-IE users, at least) that IE fans are less tech savvy and therefore slower and more ponderous web users than the rest of us? Or perhaps it’s a hardware issue — are IE users more likely to be using older systems with less processing power?

But what about that lower bounce rate? At around 35%, it’s a pretty strong number, especially compared to 41% for Firefox users and 42% for Chrome. A lower bounce rate generally signifies that people who come to your site find it relevant and worth sticking around to check out. Are IE users better searchers and more likely to arrive at the right destination, or are they simply more easily satisfied than other users?

Finding #2: iPad users are more similar to desktop users than they are to smartphone users.

While 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. This isn’t a huge surprise. We know that most iPad users are browsing in the comfort of their home, and they consider their iPad to be more like a small laptop than an oversized phone. What’s interesting here is that, even though iPad performance lags behind desktop (it is a mobile device, after all, and it suffers from many of the same performance constraints as a smartphone: from low processor power to touchscreen lag), iPad users seem willing to stick around for a longer desktop-like experience.

Finding #3: iPhone users consistently view fewer pages, spend less time on site, and have a higher bounce rate.

At the opposite end of the spectrum from Internet Explorer users we find iPhone users. In every sample group, iPhone users, on average, spent significantly less time on site (2:31 vs 3:20) and viewed fewer pages (2.41 vs 3.1) than Android, and had a higher bounce rate (60.76% vs 57.17%). The shorter time spent on site could be attributed to the (arguable) fact that iPhones are better-powered than other devices, but that doesn’t account for the page views and bounce rate. Do these validate all the stereotypes about iPhone users: that they — or should I say, we — are impatient, savvy web users who will bounce from a site if we can’t find what we want right away and aggressively search elsewhere? Or that we know what we want and can expedite a transaction faster and more efficiently than other users?

Takeaways

This research doesn’t directly answer Mac’s questions, but it does come at them sideways and raise some interesting — to me, anyway — questions about the types of people who use different technologies, and how and why they use them. We can’t answer these questions today, but these findings are food for thought and debate.

Your thoughts?

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By: Josh Bixby Category: Ecommerce, Mobile, Research Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

When it comes to mobile development, does bandwidth still matter?

12 Jan 2012

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If you work in mobile development, there’s a good chance you already have a strong opinion about responsive design. (If you don’t already have a strong opinion, that will probably change by the end of this year. As buzz phrases go, “responsive design” could be the “cloud computing” of 2012.)

Given all this, I couldn’t not respond to this post about responsive design written by Joaquin Lippincott, president of Metal Toad Media: When It Comes to Mobile Development, Stop Worrying about Bandwidth. He makes some good points about the fact that some responsive design techniques — such as swapping out images for CSS3, and using other CSS3 techniques like gradients and transparencies — are processor-intensive, meaning that while they may deliver superior performance, they can be tough on your device’s CPU.

But this statement stopped me in my tracks:

When it comes to building websites in 2012, bandwidth truly doesn’t matter. [emphasis mine] And it’s going to matter even less in 2013 with the roll out of more 4G networks. Additionally many devices are often on wi-fi, so provider network speed is truly a non-issue. Even on 3G, bandwidth isn’t a big deal – we’re streaming HD video, so don’t sweat 20k images.

To say that bandwidth seriously doesn’t matter, in any context, is obvious bait for any performance geek. True, a growing number of mobile users are browsing via tablets at home over their wifi connection, but this shouldn’t distract us from the fact that mobile use is growing across the board, which means that the total number of people connecting over 3G and 4G is still increasing. And any mobile user who is sensitive to their data cap — and to those monthly bills from their telecom provider — will tell you that, for them, bandwidth truly does still matter.

Not surprisingly, there were comments from a few performance geeks at the end of the post, which ultimately led to Joaquin clarifying his point to mean that developers and designers need to balance the trade-offs between bandwidth and CPU load.

While I think that anyone who builds sites for a living gets the fact that speed is an important usability issue (or as I prefer to put it: speed is THE important usability issue), I hear alarm bells when I hear people casually toss off statements like “bandwidth doesn’t matter”. To me, this post demonstrates the wide gap that still exists between design and performance. It also makes me wonder what kinds of conversations are happening out there between digital media agencies and their clients, who might not have the technical background to understand the nuances of what’s being discussed.

Your thoughts on juggling responsive design and mobile performance? I’d love to hear stories from the trenches.

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By: Josh Bixby Category: Mobile Tags: , , ,

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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By: Josh Bixby Category: Browsers, Industry news, Mobile, Third-party content Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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