What is the WPO and Mobile Page Speed ?

WPO or Web Performance Optimization can be defined as the best web development technique. In some ways it is very similar to hydraulic engineering, more or less, just replace fluids with data and liters with kilobytes. A great experience and a deep knowledge on the behavior of web browsers is required, I would even say empathy with the behavior of web browsers.

For non-expert developers it is sufficient to create web pages whose weight includes text, fonts, images, css and JavaScript files, does not exceed 400kb, set the cache and file compression and have a good server hosting. But what if you have a 100 or more megabytes web page that needs to be optimized for mobile performance ?

For example, if you add the jQuery library to the necessary library of google analytics you won’t be able to add much more if you want to optimize the web page for mobile speeds.

So how do you do it ?

Well the good news is that there are front-end and back-end web development techniques that solve these and also other problems related to mobile performances.

According to Google’s statistical analysis, if a page does not load within 3 seconds on the 4G network, about 53% of mobile users don’t load the page and not only abandon but never return.

What is the loading speed of a web page?

Called latency, is the speed measured on wired/4G/3G network of a web content in a device with the browser cache disabled. With the browser cache disabled because it is necessary to place oneself in the position of one who loads a web content for the first time.

What influences perfomance ?

  • hardware (virtual/real)

  • network bandwidth

  • load distance balancing (client server distance)

  • application complexity

  • memory consuption

  • response time of databases and service providers

  • user/client load

  • time slots (of day, day of week, holidays, etc.)

Why does the user leave a slow web page ?

The fundamental reasons are three:

  • cost for excessive user data consumption
  • user battery consumption
  • user experience

An important note is that relating to sustainability. The heavier a web content is, the more it consumes electricity and the more it produces CO2 .

Today the web has the same CO2 footprint as global air travel.

Data = CO2
1 Gigabyte sent by wired network: 3 kg CO2
1 Gigabyte sent by wirelessly (3G/4G): 35 kg CO2
source: Summit 2017 Vancouver by Susteinable UX

About it, every developer can take to adopt greener hosting for their applications and make optimized and lighter applications possible.

From an economic point of view of companies, whether they want to communicate something or sell, a user who is leaving the web page, due to slowness, is a cost, a loss.

How much cost one second of delay ?

A 1 second delay in page response can
result in a 7% reduction in conversions.
If an e-commerce site is making
$/€ 100,000 per day, a 1 second page
delay could potentially cost $/€ 2.5
million in lost sales every year.

For those who wishing to deepen about web performance optimization, take a look at the guidelines of these links: