Many responsive sites are experiencing sluggish load times and image size is being reported as the principle cause of the under-performance.
Trilibis, which just so happens to offer a server-side responsive design technology solution, surveyed 155 responsive sites and found that just 21 percent were loading in less than four seconds on a smartphone. What's worse, 32 percent of the sites surveyed took between 8-48 seconds to load. I sure hope I'm not alone here in thinking that page-load times of that extensive length are simply unacceptable.
The survey revealed that the aforementioned primary cause of the slowness and delay, images, was responsible for upward of 50 percent of the overall page weight for 69 percent of the survey sample. Page weight isn't nearly a significant an issue for desktops, but it sure is on mobile.
Trilibis also explored whether server-side processing could lower overall page weight and improve performance on mobile devices and found that, using its own image optimization solution, it could reduce page weight by 57 percent for desktop sites, 74 percent for tablets and 77 percent for smartphones.
"The mobile Web is considerably slower than its wireline counterpart," said Ted Verani, SVP of sales and marketing at Trilibis. "By serving images and pages that are optimized for mobile devices, we see dramatic improvements in page-load time, which translates to a much better overall user experience."