Allpar and site loading times
We’ve been watching the amount of time it takes people to load Allpar rise and rise and rise, and we’ve been wondering why. We keep making things faster and things keep getting slower.
Well, I just figured it out.
It’s the browsers. Mainly, it’s Android!
Here’s the average site loading time per platform:
1) Windows: 6.84 seconds
2) Mac: 5.47 seconds
3) Android: 22.71 seconds (that’s not a typo)
4) Linux: 5.48 seconds
iPod, iPhone, etc don’t seem to trip Google’s meters, so I don’t know what influence they have.
What’s interesting about this is that the delays seem to be entirely caused by the 10%-20% of visitors who use smartphones. In short, I’ve responded to the demands for bigger and better photography, better use of big monitors, etc., only to be blindsided by mobile phones.
My response so far has been to move to a new, lighter, faster menu system, which made a significant dent in the problem, to add systems to the home page “mobile view” version, to research site conversion services, and to put in a new mobile feature for Allpar News, which is a bigger than usual mobile center.
For the future, at some point I will be setting up a site at allpar.mobi with minified pages automatically converted for mobile use. My guess, though, is that I don’t really have to do EVERY page, 80% of mobile hits are probably to the news, forums, and a dozen or two permanent pages. Still, mobile conversion is pretty intense, if done manually!
PS> Wondering about that low Mac number? I’m guessing it’s a combination of a few Windows smartphones and the fact that there are no true low-end Macs… and no Mac netbooks.
