practice
Article development led by
queue.acm.org
An overview of techniques
to speed page loading.
By tammy EVERts
Doi: 10.1145/2492007.2492024
Rules for
mobile
Performance
optimization
PerForManCe has alWays Been CruCial to the success
of websites. A growing body of research has proven
that even small improvements in page-load times lead
to more sales, more ad revenue, more stickiness,
and more customer satisfaction for enterprises ranging
from small e-commerce shops to megachains such
as Walmart.
For years Web developers could count on steady
improvements in hardware and bandwidth to help
deliver an optimal user experience. In recent years,
however, the explosion of mobile Web browsing has
reversed this. The lower bandwidth, higher latency,
smaller memories, and lower processing power of
mobile devices have imposed an even more urgent
need to optimize performance at the front end in
order to meet user expectations.
This article summarizes the case
for front-end optimization and provides an overview of strategies and
tactics to speed up your pages, with an
emphasis on addressing mobile performance issues.
No matter how interesting, beautiful, or cleverly interactive your Web
pages are, if they take more than two
or three seconds to render, whether
on a desktop or a mobile device, users
quickly become impatient. They are
measurably less likely to convert from
browsing to buying and may even hit
the back button or close the browser
before the page ever loads.
Even delays of less than one second
significantly affect revenues. In 2006
Marissa Mayer, with Google at the time,
recounted that, after users indicated
they wanted to see more than 10 search
results per page, Google experimented
with showing 30 instead. To Google’s
surprise, traffic and revenue dropped
by 20% in this experiment, apparently
