Over the past few years we’ve seen a tremendous growth in mobile traffic on the web. Because of this many of the most successful websites have invested in optimizing the experience of users on whatever device they use and however they connect to the internet. With mobile traffic now exceeding desktop, serving a quality mobile experience is more important than ever. During the recent holiday weekend, I was wondering how much retail traffic occurred via mobile or desktop devices. Was there a large shift towards mobile during peak times on Black Friday and Cyber Monday? Did mobile usage spike on specific days, or times of day? And when users are connecting from mobile, are they connecting over cellular networks or WiFi?
The HTTP Archive is an open source project that tracks how the web is built. Twice a month it crawls 1.3 million web pages on desktop and emulated mobile devices, and collects technical information about each of the web pages. That information is then aggregated and made available in curated reports. The raw data is also made available via Google BigQuery, which makes answering interesting questions about the web accessible to anyone with some knowledge of SQL as well as the curiosity to dig in.
The Application Cache has been deprecated and removed from the web standards. While some browsers still support it - that support is going away. For example, starting with Firefox 44 a console warning advised developers to use Service Workers instead. In Chrome v68, when an HTTP page loads with AppCache configured, the browser provides a warning that v69 will restrict AppCache to secure context only.
Last month WebPageTest added support for Wappalyzer, which makes it super easy to uncover technologies used on websites. And now a month later the data from it is available in the HTTP Archive!
A few years ago Brotli compression entered into the webperf spotlight with impressive gains of up to 25% over gzip compression. The algorithm was created by Google, who initially introduced it as a way to compress web fonts via the woff2 format. Later in 2015 it was released as a compression library to optimize the delivery of web content. Despite Brotli being a completely different format from Gzip, it was quickly supported by most modern web browsers.
Over the years it has been fun to track website page weight by comparing it to milestones such as the size of a floppy disk (1.44MB), the size of the original install size of DOOM (2.39MB) and when it hit 3MB last summer.
During a discussion about correlating 3rd party content to performance I decided to have some fun combining both the HTTP Archive and Chome User Experience Report data sets to see what we can learn. The results were pretty conclusive that there is a strong correlation between the % of 3rd party content on a site and the load times (measured via the onLoad metric).
Last week I wrote a blog post showing some examples of how you can use the Chrome User Experience report to compare your site’s RUM data to competitors. In this post I’d like to share some brief videos to help you quickly get started exploring the data via Google BigQuery.
For years Real User Measurement (RUM) has been the gold standard for how to measure the performance of web applications. And the reason for it is quite simple: there is no better measure for how users are experiencing your site, than the users’ actual experiences themselves.
Have you ever wondered why WebPageTest can sometimes show that a repeat view loaded with less bytes downloaded, while also triggering warnings related to browser caching? It can seem like the test is reporting an issue that does not exist, but in fact it’s often a sign of a more serious issue that should be investigated. Often the issue is not the lack of caching, but rather lack of control over how your content is cached.
