The good news is that responsive website design has a significant advantage over non-responsive sites, while the bad news is that very few websites are both responsive and fast, leaving plenty of room for improvement.
Software and services company Restive, LLC recently released a State of the Mobile Web report on their assessment of websites of the Fortune 1000 largest companies, based on revenue. Analysis of these company’s websites has provided valuable information on the current state of the Mobile Web.
Key Findings
- 36% of all assessed websites are responsive (customized to work on mobile devices)
- Of the responsive websites, 60% are on dedicated mobile sub-domains, domains or sub-folders. Only 14.7% are responsive to their primary URL, requiring no mobile redirection
- 6% of all assessed websites are fast or high performance
- 3% of all assessed websites are both responsive and fast
- 53% of all assessed websites are larger than 1Mb and 57% require 40 or more HTTP requests to load
- Majority of all assessed websites require significant performance optimization with 67% requiring GZip Compression and 83% requiring minification of Javascript, CSS or HTML
- More time is spent on responsive websites than non responsive websites and more time is spent on fast websites than slow websites
Recommendations
While they only comprise 3% of all assessed websites, the benefits of a responsive and fast website more than make up for the costs and time involved with developing these sites. A better user experience across all platforms helps ensure more time is spent on responsive websites versus non-responsive, and more time is also spent on fast websites versus slow ones.
According to Obinwanne Hill, Founder and CEO of Restive LLC and author of the report, websites “…still have a long way to go to attain readiness for a world where the Smartphone or Tablet is the primary Web access device…Websites need to be both Responsive and Fast to deliver an awesome experience for mobile users and we’re currently working on user-friendly tools and technologies to help Web designers and developers make this happen sooner rather than later.”
For a copy of the full report, go to http://www.restive.io/insights/state-of-the-mobile-web-ee-Q1-2014.html
