Back in August Digiday wrote about how GQ cut its webpage load time by 80 percent ( emphasis mine ):
Before GQ relaunched its website July 1, pages took a painfully long seven seconds to load. With GQ’s mobile visitor at 53 percent of its traffic and growing, that was an unacceptable lag.
Always good to hear about sites doing more to improve the performance of their site ( mobile or not ). Unfortunately the only data point they provided was that the page took “seven seconds to load”. It isn’t clear what they were measuring that took seven seconds, or under what conditions the test was run.
So I went to webpagetest.org and ran my own tests:
- Chrome, Cable ( 5Mbps/1Mbps 28ms RTT ) from Dulles, VA: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/151019_PP_R1Q/
- Chrome ( mobile emu ), 3GSlow ( 780Kpbs/330Kbps 200ms RTT ) from Dulles, VA: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/151019_FQ_RJ5/
The mobile site is definitely lighter than the desktop one. Fully loaded desktop first view is 9.5MB and mobile is 5.1MB. Unfortunately under these test conditions the first view mobile site still took 61.6 seconds to fully load.