Synthetic Monitoring
It’s the Age of the Smartphone, and users all want fast internet. The problem is, smartphones don’t have the fat connections that desktop computers and laptops enjoy with stable internet access. Mobile users instead have data plans that charge by byte or second, and using a hotspot or a 4G connection can be aggravating if you’re already in a hurry and the page on your screen isn’t loading the way you’d like it to. In the world of website performance, there are a couple basic things you can do to improve mobile browsing so that users have a similar experience to their laptops. Slow connections mean fewer users, which for companies with heavy internet traffic means loss in revenue from lost conversions.
Two Big Culprits Causing An Internet Slowdown
Too many <scripts>
You may be aware that the more bytes sent from a server contained in a page, the more requests your browser has to make, which all means more waiting time on slow connections. One of the biggest culprits of this is JavaScript. Although a useful and fun way to make web pages more interesting, JavaScript does not act like CSS or HTML. Instead, the browser has to look up the JavaScript engine every time it encounters a script block (they look like <script>), to process it correctly. So, use as few script blocks as possible to make your page running smoother and loading quicker.
Not optimizing your images
We include this tip nearly every time we mention anything related to improving website performance, but it’s one of the basics (like drinking 8 glasses of water a day!). Keep in mind that file size of an image impacts the time a browser takes to load a webpage. There are many tools on the web you can use to optimize your images in a way that rids the image files of extraneous bytes and keeps the quality as intact as possible. Different programs exist for different types of image files, i.e. JPG, PNG, GIF. We talked about page bloat in our last post, and how industry insiders expect this trend to increase to ~2200 KB by this May. What this means for mobile users is that we can expect to see even bigger pages in the future, even though connectivity speeds are not increasing at an equal rate. In many ways, it can be thought of in terms of carrying capacity and the web, and how our demand for greater connectivity on our mobile devices is outstripping our browser’s capacity to process deliveries. Before consulting an expert, try limiting your JavaScript and image files to improve webspeed performance.