subject: 3 Fast Way To Speed Up Your Mobile Site -- Part-2 [print this page] If you have not done so, it is recommended you read over Part-1 > http://keynote.com/benchmark/mobile_wireless/article_speed_up_your_mobile_site.shtml of 3 Fast Way To Speed Up Your Mobile Site' of mobile website optimization series!.
This is the Part-2 of 3 Fast Way To Speed Up Your Mobile Site' of mobile website optimization series! In which we are start looking at how you speed up your mobile website performance, most profitably.
Get Rid of the Redirects
As fundamental as it may seem, many site owners don't alter their approach at all when tackling a mobile website performance project. Call it "desktop thinking," or terrestrial, landline, wireline thinking by any name, it ignores the fundamental reality of the cellular network, which as described above, is inherently slower and riddled with opportunities for website performance degradation.
One common desktop tactic that causes issues in mobile website is the URL redirect, which instructs the browser to follow a different URL than the one originally requested. There are a number of legitimate reasons to employ this technique to direct users to your third-party site host; to offer nicknames that provide multiple paths to the main site; or to send users to a site designed specifically for the detected browser that is browser compatibilty.
This is generally a fine practice in the desktop browser world, where redirects usually happen in the blink of an eye and are virtually undetectable to the user. Use the same technique on a mobile site, though, where the big "L" latency colors the entire experience, and you end up with users staring and staring at a screen where nothing's happening.
Surprisingly, even some of the biggest retailers have mobile sites bogged down with URL redirects. The problems become apparent when measuring site performance over an actual cellular network (as opposed to a WiFi connection).
Here's a real-life example with measurements taken from the field of a recognizable brand site we'll call "retailer X." Our test user punches in the URL for the site to do some shopping or check a price. As shown in the accompanying waterfall graph, though, the browser is directed to other URLs not once, twice, or three times, but four times before the base page begins to load. Every time the browser receives a redirect, it has to process it locally, then send the new URL back to the server again, over the sometimes-fast, sometimes-slow cellular network. And it does it again, and again, and again.
Almost nine potentially excruciating seconds tick by before the user sees anything of the site he or she wants to see. Nine seconds go by before they can even begin the task they came to perform, whether it's looking for a product, checking a price, or trying to find the store nearest them.
At what point does the user come to the conclusion that the site's not working, or that it's not worth the wait? If they've just navigated from a well-built mobile site that loaded quickly, there's a good chance they're not going to wait eight seconds. How likely is it that they'll come back again? How likely they'll tell their friends about the experience? Forget what that means in terms of a lost sale. What does it mean for retailer X's brand image?
In retailer X's case, eliminating two redirects would cut the time waiting for the page to load from nine seconds to around six not desktop fast, but much more in line with what a mobile user would consider acceptable.
Conclusion:
In this module, we have moved beyond looking at the dos n donts' of setting up redirects URLs to provide an insight into some of the less familiar or widely known aspects of successful mobile website performance.
In our next part of the series 3 fast way to speed up mobile website', we will expand on this concept further.
