Lopez Family blog

I recently had to do some research for an article on mobile web performance, so I looked up stats on mobile phones and mobile web applications. There were several angles to it, the website, the phone that was being used to reach the website and the carrier the phone used to access the Internet.

Among the things I found in my research was the fact that Nokia phones are the most popular mobile phones in the world, something like 40% of the world’s mobile phones are Nokia, just for some reference, iPhones make up 13% of the world’s mobile phones (Click here to see the report). Surprisingly when looking at phones that are used to access the internet it’s very close between Nokia and iPhone. Stat Counter is a great place for that sort of information.

Ok so you’re probably thinking that it’s not big news that the iPhone is close to being the most popular phone for accessing the web. But what I did find interesting was the fact that some web applications are aimed at particular browsers/devices. So if the visitor is using an iPhone they get one version of the application, if they use a Nokia they’ll get a different version, if you’re using your home computer yet another, etc., etc.

This sounds like a good thing, but, consider the fact that the iPhone runs a full browser but uses phone carriers to get it’s data. This means that a full application is being passed on to the phone via what is the equivalent of a DSL connection. The image of camel through eye of needle comes to mind.

I can’t go into detail of the findings since the article hasn’t been published yet but the last bit that I’ll share is that out of the four carriers that I used in my study, Sprint was the fastest and T-Mobile was the slowest. The other two were Verizon and AT&T.

As I took the time to get the blog back up and running I remembered how slow it was. Considering I make my living by telling people that performance matters and consult with them on how to improve their site’s performance I thought this a bit embarrassing.

Of course I’d known for a long time that this blog was slow and heavy but never had dedicated the time to improving it because I was too busy helping others improve theirs.

This past week I made some changes to make the site faster. The first thing I did was to move the videos off to Vimeo instead of hosting them on our site. I did the same thing with our pictures, all our new albums are on Picasa. By moving all this heavy content off the blog, the size of the pages was reduced and thus the response time dropped. The last change was actually the one that made the biggest difference. I installed a WordPress plug-in called “WP Super Cache” which makes static files from the dynamically created WordPress pages. My colleague Stephen Pierzchala actually measured the performance difference when he switched to using WP Super Cache.

The result is an average response time of about 2 seconds for the US and about 5 to 6 seconds in Europe and sadly 12 seconds in China. Not too concerned about that last one since I’m pretty sure we have no readers in China or anywhere in Asia for that matter.

My favorite part of all this is that our blog is now also available on your mobile phone.