4 ms·
The performance numbers are a really helpful illustration of the problem with a lot of sites. A detail it misses and I see people constantly forget, is any indi
by giantrobot 5y ago
The performance numbers are a really helpful illustration of the problem with a lot of sites. A detail it misses and I see people constantly forget, is any individual user might have one of those crappy connections at multiple points during the day or even move through all of them.
It doesn't matter if your home broadband is awesome if you're currently at the store trying to look something up on a bloated page. It's little consolation that the store wrote an SPA to do fancy looking fades when navigating between links when it won't even load right in the store's brick and mortar location.
Far too many web devs are making terrible assumptions about not just bandwidth but latency. Making a hundred small connections might not require a lot of total bandwidth but when each connection takes a tenth to a quarter of a second just to get established there's a lot of time a user is blocked unable to do anything. Asynchronous loading just means "I won't explicitly block for this load", it doesn't mean that dozens of in-flight requests won't cause de facto blocking.
I'm using the web not because I love huge hero images or fade effects. I'm using the web to get something accomplished like buy something or look up information. Using my time, bandwidth, and battery poorly by forcing me to accommodate your bloated web page makes me not want to give you any money.
- ajsnigrutin 5y agoYep... in large stores like ikea, i've had huge problems with my connection falling down to 2g speeds, and finding anything online was a huge pain in the ass. First thing to load should be the page layout with text already inside, then images, then everything else... some pages ignore this, load nothing + a huge JS library, then start with random crap, and i get bored and close my browser, before i get the actual text.
- nicbou 5y agoYes! A subset of your users will access your website from public transportation, where reception can be significantly worse. I specifically designed my website to work reasonably fast on the Berlin U-Bahn, where some of my readers are likely to be.
- giantrobot 5y agoI experienced this problem just yesterday which I found ironic since I had recently posted about it. I was in Home Depot and couldn't find what I was looking for. So I pulled up the website to see if it says they're in stock to ask an employee. It took me wandering the store for a few minutes to get a good enough signal to load the damn web page. Home Depot web devs, make sure someone can load the Home Depot web page in side one of your stores filled with steel shelves and other cellular hating materials. I can't imagine trying to use Home Depot's website inside a store is some super edge case that's not worth the effort.
- nicbou 5y agoI forgot to mention users who have a fast connection, but are browsing from the other end of the house, where the WiFi is not so good.