I saw an interesting Youtube Video from @dan-shappir titled ’ My Website is Slow, Now What ?’ Website speed is something I’ve been looking at for a while, and after seeing this video I actually took a subscription with gtMetrix to do monitoring of multiple websites we made.
I’ve been trying many optimizations but noticed there are other factors that are not in my control.
One thing that stands out to me is the difference in loading time between desktop (first screenshot) and mobile (second screenshot), and in particular the very first file that is loaded in the waterfall. That very first file seems to take 200ms on desktop but 2-4 seconds on mobile for some reason. And it seems to hold up the loading of the whole rest of the website.
I thought this is an issue worth mentioning, especially because this seems to happen with the Wix sites but not EditorX sites. I’m not an expert in website performance but it does stand out to me.
So, there are a lot of factors that come into play when loading sites.
I tend to find, that external tools that are used to test site loading times, tend to add extra ‘loading time’ to mobile sites. Traditionally, because mobile sites take longer to load.
There are a few things that can be done to help with sitting loading time, such as reducing image quality (jpg tends to load quicker than png).
Site loading tools, often look at how quickly the whole page loads. I don’t know if other people do this, but I tend to worry more about how quickly a user can interact with the site, and what they see first. If an image at the bottom of the page hasn’t loaded straight away, then it can load in the background whilst the user scrolls through the page.
The order in which things load, is dictated by the site structure, and how it has been built.
In addition, mobile sites do take longer to load than desktops, because the processing power is lesser.
This blog post made by Wix, might help
https://www.wix.com/blog/2019/04/website-speed-optimization/
I hope this helps you.
We are actually having a webinar TODAY about Core Web Vitals. Don’t forget to sign up:
https://www.wix.com/webinar/core-web-vitals-webinar?utm_source=community
Hi Noah, thanks very much for your reply. I’m a bit confused now though, you are saying mobile sites take longer to load because the processing power is less. I certainly think that’s true in general. However in the specific example report I shared it says receiving of the first file in the waterfall takes 4.19secs. I thought that was just receiving and didn’t include any processing? Before getting the first file there wouldn’t be anything to process?
I’m not sure whether GTmetrix automatically add any extra loading time for mobile, but I could ask them.
@verbaldancing I’m by no stretch of the imagination a genius when it comes to this topic.
I know basic stuff about how to optimise a site for loading, and understand some of the reports when it comes to the actual tests and figures.
I’m not entirely sure, there are probably better people to answer this one.
Optimising your site as best as possible is the first step to helping with loading times
