In our last few articles, we have covered the idea of light and fast downloads to ensure quick load speed. Optimizing images, playing videos only after click, and more provide a better experience on mobile devices. This time we will explore the idea of memory usage on the client device. How much memory, CPU, and more does it take to load everything?
LinkedIn reaches 2.4GB
In a recent discussion on Hacker News, the poster noted that LinkedIn was taking 2.4GB of ram between two open browser tabs. This sparked discussions about website and app optimization. How heavy should modern websites be after loading in the client browser on a computer or even a phone? The heavier the website the more limited the audience as some devices struggle to load them.
Comparing load speed times on lower end devices
Danluu research from March covers the topic well noting that phones capable of playing PUBG and other 3D games struggle to load and scroll the heavier sites from major publishers. Many will take 20 – 30 seconds to load or even fail to load the page at all. The amount of system resources such as CPU and memory are just too much for the devices to handle. On their site, the research covers many popular social media and open source systems. WordPress performs quite well even without detailed optimization.
How much better can we do than the Danluu score for WordPress? That depends on the plugins, themes, and more used by your website. You can optimize for speed using caching to enable fully static pages to cache the edge. Many other similar strategies help to bring it down even on devices with limited resources. Unfortunately, compression, client side caching, and other strategies do not work as well on these as they lack the hardware to fully take advantage of it.
Optimizing your website for memory and wider audiences
Dynamic frameworks, interactive media, videos, and more can make for a visually impressive experience. As we see from research, it can also reduce your website’s reach by making it much slower or even fail to load on memory constrained devices. With that in mind, using WordPress is a good place to start. The research shows it loading among the fastest available and with further optimizing it is even faster. Be careful of adding plugins for telemetry, audience tracking, advertising frameworks, and similar as these can be very memory intensive on the client side.
You can measure the effect of each new addition by benchmarking it with tools like PageSpeed after each installation or setting change. This helps to ensure that anything added doesn’t incorporate cache breaking behaviors or other bad defaults. You can also check the amount of memory used in your local browser on desktop to verify how much ballpark your website takes compared to others.
Stay tuned for next week as we dig more into research showing how you can optimize your website and stay higher in search engine rankings