Mobile Web Performance Still Frustrating, Study Finds

Despite huge advances in mobile Web browsing, most users remain frustrated by the slow speed at which Web pages are delivered on their smart phones, a study by Compuware suggests. The 2011 survey of 4,014 global mobile web users found that 71 percent of users expect websites to load as quickly, almost as quickly or faster on their mobile phone compared to the computer they use at home, up from 58 percent in 2009.

Some 57 percent of mobile web users had a problem in the past year when accessing a website and 47 percent had a problem accessing an app on their phone.

Nearly 60 percent of web users say they expect a website to load on their mobile phone in three seconds or less, and 74 percent are only willing to wait five seconds or less for a single web page to load before leaving the site. 50 percent are only willing to wait five seconds or less for an application to load before exiting.

If you remember browsing on a mobile phone several years ago, it was a fairly unpleasant experience. There was no effort to render a page the way it would display on a PC. In fact, the strategy was to strip out as much formatting as possible and render the text and basic images to allow the user to get the content of the page, but not the presentation.

That changed in 2007 with the iPhone. Web pages could be rendered very close to how the desktop did it and, with zooming, you could easily navigate the page and read the content. Mobile Web Performance Still Stinks, Users Say

Download the study here.