High Performance Mobile Web

Chapter 1. The Mobile Web World

The topic of performance on the mobile web might seem confusing at first. Isn’t the mobile web the same web as the one we already know?

The answer is not so simple. Yes, it’s the same web; but the context in which it’s being accessed—from a variety of browsers, devices, screens, and networks—is very different. Those differences play a big role in determining performance—or the lack of it—and that’s why we need to pay special attention to the mobile web.

Fortunately, following the idea originally stated by Luke Wroblewski in Mobile First, if you first apply performance techniques for mobile devices, your website will also perform well and faster on other kinds of devices, including desktops and TVs.

Mobile Performance First

If you have a multidevice web solution, starting to optimize the mobile web performance will also help with other devices, such as when using desktop browsers. While most techniques in this book can be applied to both the classic and mobile web, some of them are specific to mobile devices’ problems and therefore it’s easier if we start with them.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not pushing the idea of having a separate web. Ultimately, we are still talking about the same content and the same services, accessed from different devices. In this chapter, we’ll cover the differences from the desktop web, which we will call from now on the classic web—that is the web from the main browsers on typically desktop-based operating systems, such ...