Making the Mobile Web Go Faster
by Peter
Here’s an interesting performance comparison. Bing vs. Google on Sprint’s network in Colorado. I’m going to make the assumption that both companies have brilliant engineers, unlimited budgets for servers, CDN’s etc. Basically anything and everything that can make their page get their faster.
So why is Google so much slower than Bing on Mobile? Well at first blush it appears that it might be related to the “extra 74,460 bytes” that Google is transmitting as part of the page.
However the time delta of 86% slower wouldn’t be covered by that amount of data. (Some of it would though). So what else could be causing the problem. Well look at the number of page elements – Bing has 7, while Google has 18.
Also if we dig into the HAR report from Google we see that it contains a huge chunk of JavaScript which has to be downloaded and compiled before it can be displayed.
In short:
- Google is sending too much data
- JavaScript account for over 50% of the page content
- On both pages I had “find my location” turned off
Measuring Web performance is never as black and white as I’ve made it above. There are too many variables to measure. However common sense is as good a yard stick as any, and here’s it’s pretty obvious what the problem is. Too much JavaScript and too many page elements.
If you want your page to load faster simply reduce the size of those two items.