Mobile Sites Are Supposed To Be Slow, But Not This Slow
Written by Evan SchumanFebruary 3rd, 2010
Best Buy Does OK, Costco Tanks. When Keynote Systems started looking at the mobile sites from major retailers late last year, the veteran mobile and Web site test and measurement firm knew that these sites would be a lot slower than their wired Web counterparts. But some at Keynote were caught off-guard by just how slow some of the major retailers’ mobile sites were. To put this difference into context, Keynote argues that a wired Web site should, on average, be able to deliver a page—especially the site's homepage—within two seconds. For mobile, Keynote said, users should tolerate sites that are about twice as slow, or about 4 seconds on average.
In its examination of 10 major E-tail sites—Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Best Buy, Costco, Dell, Foot Locker, Musician’s Friend, Sears, Target and Walmart—the very fastest site (Best Buy) averaged more than twice Keynote’s acceptable slow estimate, crawling in at 8.3 seconds. Again, that was the fastest mobile site. The slowest site delivered its average page in 34 seconds. Keynote officials steadfastly refused to identify which site was the slowest. That said, points made by Keynote while discussing the study pretty much eliminated all of the tested retailers other than Costco from being candidates for the slowest performing site.
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4 Comments | Read Mobile Sites Are Supposed To Be Slow, But Not This Slow
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February 3rd, 2010 at 8:08 pm
When Google rose to prominence, the leading “portals” at the time were racing to see who could bloat their homepage more with ever shrinking fonts. It seems this lesson has been forgotten with some mobile apps. Here is a shocker: by and large, users don’t care how your mobile page looks. Really. Users want to be able to find what they are looking for quickly. You need to optimize your templates and navigation for mobility. Putting your webpage on the mobile is a recipe for disaster. How do you do that? Stop listening to designers and web developers with little or no mobile experience. Talk to a usability expert and an experienced mobile developer. One mobile application I happen to know intimately has no flash, no javascript and, other than content, only one image (the logo). It flies and is completely portable. Users want to use it; there is no secret.
February 3rd, 2010 at 9:50 pm
I agree. Stick with XHTML MP or something light-weight. Most anyway mobile browsers can’t process fancy stuff like flash.
February 4th, 2010 at 11:42 am
These retailers need a mobile-centric knowledgeable vendor that only develops mobile side solutions. What happened at these retailers, is that full-screen, non-mobile-centric developers were used. The best mobile apps do not come from the minds of full-screen, PC/Server, type programmers. I’ll bet that the retailers criteria matrix didn’t even include performance benchmarking. Why, because they are thinking like PC/Server developers…….
February 15th, 2010 at 4:01 pm
Shopping on a mobile is just as silly as trying to watch video on one, the new gadget fascination brought on by witless people. And people wonder why the world is so messed up. Greed, not so smart people, the list goes on and on…