Can your customer rely on your mobile site?

We often talk about speed and optimization, but site reliability is just as important to get your customers to repeatedly visit to your mobile site and build brand loyalty. According to the Keynote Mobility Survey, 48% of smartphone users experienced a problem with loading errors and the inability to open the page.

This can be a frustrating experience for mobile users and a good reason to either not come back or visit your competitors mobile site. 

There are a few standard practices to combat the pitfalls of bad performance, and continuous monitoring & testing is the best way to find out when and where your mobile site is failing. Finding issues before your customers do and fixing them quickly is the key to scoring well in terms of website reliability. 

Who does reliability right?

Keynote keeps running measurements of mobile websites from several industries on our KeynoteMobile Performance Indices. On any given week we can see different companies at the top of the list for reliability. But if you follow the weekly indices long enough you'll see that the companies that rank best tend to be the same, suggesting a greater attention to mobile website availability. For the week ending September 9th, here's who were on top

Learn more about:

1. Why Web Load Testing?

2. How to monitoring site

3. Free website monitoring 

10 Tips to Improve User Experience of your site

Hi. My name is Ben, and I plan to visit your website a lot! I’m a casual user that likes to browse the Internet, and like everyone else I know, I hate to wait. Although your website is really cool, and I love your products and services, the Internet is full of interesting places and I’m easily distracted. Oh, and did I mention that I love using my Android smartphone and iPad to play, connect, shop, bank and book travel when I’m not at work? All I want for the holidays is a speedy web and mobile site.
Here are top 10 wishes of a user for you and your site in 2012:

1. Please test your code/site on IE and not just Firefox before you launch it. I am one of the 50% that will continue using IE, even after they start auto-upgrades!
2. Understand the difference between browser execution and network/back-end performance. Most pages have both and you need to know which is which to optimize the page/site. One way is to monitor using a real browser.
3. Understand how your page renders. Focus on reducing upfront (pre-render) delay. It’s the one me and your other users feel the most!
4. Please make sure your third party tags (analytics and others) are below your visual content. (Did I mention rendering delays and blocks are aggravating?)
5. Please combine your external JS and CSS files. I’ve been saying this for years, but very few sites seem to follow this recommendation. Do it, and I’ll see a major improvement in the speed of your site.
6. Understand the quality your Content Delivery Network is providing. Every website is unique, and not all CDN providers are created equal.
7. Don’t worry so much about overall page size but instead focus on individual file/resource sizes. Keep them under 100K and you will limit the impact of slower connections. (Did I mention I love my smartphone?)
8. Don’t just push your desktop website to mobile. You will fail.
9. Test your mobile web site… please!
10. Read Keynote’s Page Construction Guidelines. They’re chocked full of goodies to help you optimize the performance your Web pages and keep visitors like me happily clicking through them, instead of away to your competitor’s site.

What’s on your wish list for better web and mobile performance in 2012? Let us know in comments!


Relate Articles:

• Test Your Site on IE 9 and Measure User Experience
• fast fun touch friendly new rules
• A need for speed on mobile websites

Challenges of creating and managing robust applications

Application availability is the first quality encountered by customers, but the last one to be determined by the development process, because it depends on the quality of everything else that happens during design, development, and testing web applications. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and developing RIAs will uncover any weaknesses in an enterprise’s development and SLM processes.

RIAs inevitably involve running complex code on the client, and use more complex and application-specific strategies to manage the communication between browser and server. Making such complex code efficient and bugfree is not a task to be taken lightly.

Better tools are needed to help us meet the challenges of creating and managing robust applications; today, while the Adobe suite of Flash tools is a little more mature, Ajax development and application performance testing tools are still in their infancy. The Open Ajax initiative may help to address this issue. Therefore deploying an RIA successfully will demand more resources— skills, tools, process, time, and (of course) money—than would be required to deploy a more traditional Web-based application in which all application logic is executed on the server. Enterprises that decide to employ the technology must be prepared to invest more in design, development, testing and management to make it successful.

Read More on Rich Internet Applications.