You may know that back before the release of the iPhone and the real mobile web, websites could be as large as 20MB in size. When the iPhone was released, it came with a web browser that could view the full web - not restricted to some WAP-based website. This was a problem for web developers at the time (I for one was not one of these until 2 years later) as it meant that users using their data allowances to view their websites would ultimately pay the price of running out of data in their given packages very quickly and would suffer slow download speeds (remember, the original iPhone didn't even have 3G, shockingly).
40% of users will leave a website if it has not loaded within three seconds which means that even though my website downloads in less than one second here in the UK, 40% of users not using 3G will leave the website. The iPhone shook it up. The main outcome of it was that websites were redeveloped with Flash removed, image files compressed, CSS and JavaScript files reduced as much as possible, the HTML content split into different files and the server-side processing sped up as much as possible. It was as though things had to go back the way to before broadband became a thing, but in reality, it was just making websites more efficient with what they had.
Pingdom's Year in Review
The main subject of this blog post is to discuss Pingdom's Year in Review for 2017. This article shows some slightly worrying statistics about how the web is becoming, again.
Perhaps the most worrying statistic is exactly what was described above being reversed - websites are becoming bigger again. See this graph from the report:
While it is true that mobile devices have faster connections thanks to 4G LTE and we now have faster broadband connections, it is still worrying. I say this because there are still many people who don't have faster than a 1Mbps download speed.
At the start of this year when I relaunched my website my main focus was on client-side performance, both in terms of JavaScript and in terms of download time. I managed to get my Pingdom result from 1.5 seconds to around 400ms making it faster than 98% of websites that Pingdom tests.
My concern was more about the data usage that it costs however for a user on a smartphone. My previous phone contract limited me to 1GB of data, and I would often get through that in a few days. My current phone contract does give me 20GB of data, but I can often see me going through about 5GB of that in a month.
As well as the amount of data being downloaded, the number of HTTP requests has gone through the roof. The graph before shows both the size of a website (yellow) and the number of requests (black) made by the website. 110 requests?! That's a lot of HTTP requests. I do get that my website is a personal website, but I do believe that the most important improvement to making a website fast and efficient is reducing the number of requests. Older browsers can only send up to 70 odd requests at once, and yes, older browsers like IE8 still have some market share and we do need to try and cater for them too.
Further down the article, and it's clear that the amount of content being downloaded into a website is increasingly getting bigger too. Particularly images and JavaScript. Now, too much of those results in a lot to download but more crucially, it means more processing, particularly in relation to JavaScript. JavaScript needs to be processed immediately when it is received and as a result, puts more strain on the computer. These days this is much less of a problem with things like the incredible V8 Engine in Google Chrome and Safari's Nitro Engine. But all that processing needs to be done anyway.
The result of all of this labour on the CPU is that we have slower websites but also we drain the battery of mobile devices much faster. Perhaps this is the main reason why websites should consider what they are doing because the batteries in our smartphones aren't all that good after all (https://9to5mac.com/2017/09/25/ios-11-battery-life-problems/).
Conclusion
My concluding remarks on this are we are not going the right way about this. Building a website should not be about making it as functional as possible whilst sacrificing speed. There has to be the balance and it appears we are not doing that at the moment.
You can read more about this in the review at https://www.pingdom.com/2017.
