A poor online experience does nothing for a brand’s reputation but it doesn’t have to be that way

Not only does the user experience have to be ship-shape across mobile, desktop and tablet, so does the performance of your website. The reason is quite simple: in today’s fast-paced world, if your customer cannot find the content they are looking for quickly you’ve probably lost them forever. For this reason too, the importance of providing a consistent and high-speed brand experience across all devices that the customer may be using cannot be overstated.

Here are five tips to achieving this from Michael Gooding, Akamai Web Performance Optimisation Evangelist, who will be joining us for a webinar on April 28.

#1. Understand your delivery method or strategy for mobile

When we talk here about mobile this should be extended to tablets and other handheld connected devices and there are three main avenues: a dedicated mobile site, a dedicated app, or using responsive web design (RWD) to deliver your mobile and desktop experiences from one code base.

The first two of these options are likely to give good performance but may struggle to deliver a consistent look and feel for the user. On the flipside, the RWD solution may do well in the consistency stakes but could suffer from performance issues.

#2. Be ruthless about consistency

The solution you choose will determine where you focus your efforts, but from a consistency point of view it is important to make the user feel like the sites are one and the same. Things to consider include:

• Branding and styling. Use consistent colour schemes and icon sets. If you have separate sites it’s all too easy for these styles to grow apart as new features and enhancements are added
• Menu options. Menus often offer the gateway to navigate a site, by keeping the menus the same across browsers will help users navigate and avoid any confusion
• Browsing experience. When browsing a site you will often drill down into the detail you are looking for, make sure this is consistent across all device types
• Content. Don’t change content for the device - for example there is nothing more frustrating than finding something you are interested in on a large desktop version and then not being able to find it on the mobile version

#3.  Know the situation of the mobile user

If you are focusing on performance - and especially performance on mobile – it’s important to understand that the user will often be using a device with a smaller screen, smaller memory and less processing power. In addition, they may be on a higher latency network connection like 3G/4G so it’s important to tailor the delivery of the assets on the page so they are neither too big nor simply unnecessary. Things to consider include:

• Use the right size image for the screen size. As the screen size decreases so do the number of pixels available and simply shrinking down the same size image served to a desktop will result in excess bytes downloaded and slower page performance.
• Only serve code that is used.  When styling a page the web uses a combination of HTML and CSS. CSS, in particular, often contains conditions that should only be applied when a certain screen size is detected.  So if you can detect that screen size before sending the code, you don’t incur the performance penalty of downloading content you don’t need.
• Think about what you are hiding.  As above, we also see many sites that simply hide content and sections as screens get smaller, or have content that appears way down the page and isn’t instantly visible. By detecting this before sending content you should only send the content that is displayed to the end user.
• Cache as much content as possible.  Try to distinguish between unique and reusable content; the more you cache the less end users have to navigate mobile networks to retrieve the page content.

#4. Streamline the booking experience

Once you’ve provided a consistent look and feel the next step is securing the booking. Here it’s important to consider how all form elements behave across different devices. Some things to consider include:

• How form elements behave across different devices. For example, popup calendars may be acceptable on a desktop but don’t translate well to smaller mobile devices
• Where the user starts and ends the journey. Today many users start using mobile devices to browse and then transfer to desktop to make the purchase. Allowing users to save favourites can alleviate the pain of having to start from scratch on a new device.
• The state of your search criteria. Tweaking search criteria and making this easy to use and fast to respond rather than always sending the user back to the start of the process is really important.
• Third parties. Often when searching or booking on travel websites there will be third parties involved such as airlines or hotel systems so closely monitoring the performance of these is another thing to factor in.
• Payment. When it comes to paying for a booking consider saving payment details or partnering with other well-known third party providers that are commonly used. Adding all this detail from scratch can sometimes be painful on a mobile device and providers such as PayPal can be a quick and popular alternative.

#5. Recognise and act on the factors that influence rising demand and user loads

The travel industry can see spikes in demand for a number of reasons. Seasonal trends and marketing are the two most obvious but can also be caused by the influx of people to a geographic area - be it for a sporting, music or even business event. But rising demand doesn’t have to complicate managing performance across multiple devices. Essentially if you get the performance of your site right, then it should withstand peak demand well. Best practices for managing this include:

• Always know your limits. Regularly load tests to know what capacity you have and carefully monitor expected future traffic levels. When testing, be sure to include any important third parties that form part of your booking process.
• Cache and offload as much as you can. The closer you can position your content to your end users the faster it will deliver. By introducing external caches and offloading requests to them you can free up key resources on your own servers to provide more value.
• Have a plan B. Even with the best planning you may experience bigger spikes than you ever thought. Be prepared because the worst thing for a brand reputation is for a site to crash under high demand.

Michael Gooding,Web Performance Optimisation Evangelist, Akamai will be sharing more insights in a webinar on April 28. Sign up here