The Speed of the Mobile Web, Part 2: Tips for Content Providers

Lots of "speed" tips are focused on content providers. Plenty of information available. Here's a starting point.

In general, tips for speeding up a web site will help for at least some devices, but there are some extra niceties for mobile optimization.

Start with the giants: check out

* Yahoo: Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Website * Google: Let's make the web faster. * Google: article focusing exclusively on mobile

Some specific tips:

* Each fetch request adds to latency, even more than most desktop users' requests. Collect images into a single file. * Design and develop as if all users were using satellite connections. * Whenever you see a desktop maximum size recommendation, guess that you should multiply the number by 10%. * Understand "make sure your size is no larger than 25k because that's what the iPhone can support" type advice is not helpful for anything other than the iPhone. And 25k will take a while to download even on an iPhone. * HTML 5, while not yet a standard, is becoming available for high-end mobile browsers. Local data cache can really speed things up. * Design efficiently. Do you really need the JQuery library? It's nice, but it's big. Could you get away with a smaller framework? * Use progressive enhancement. Design a great experience for less capable devices, and enhance it for more capable. * Don't get carried away with progressive enhancement: don't send down code that a device doesn't need.

Speed and effectiveness

Speed is not just about speed; we have to consider perception of speed. We talked about that quite a bit in part 1 of the series.

Good design is about more than just speed; sometimes slower speed can result in faster perceived speed and higher satisfaction. If a user is having fun or is easily achieving her goals, she will perceive the site (or application) as being faster.

And not all speed is the same. In general, interfaces that mimic physics, such as the buttons, sliders, and scrolling in most touch interfaces, must respond immediately. The illusion of physics must not be broken. But the parts of the experience that do not mimic physics, such as following a link, can have a delay.

So the design team must design well (there are lots of tips over at Design For Mobile), and must help the entire team decide when to break the speed optimization discussed above. For example, delivering larger image sizes than strictly necessary can enhance the experience. Using the occasional gradient can enhance the experience.

It's a balancing act.