Last time I posted about WordPress blogs' performance on mobile devices. Sadly, they were not performing very well, but there are some tips and practices to improve their user experience. It's time to move to the next big blogging platform, Blogger. Now let's see the methodology:
How I measure the pages' performance: I use the Chrome performance audit tool, as it's the simplest, yet very powerful tool with many options. On top of that I run through the pages by hand and check if they're any good on mobile.
What I look for: best practices followed, the page is easy to navigate, audit - testing with slow CPU and slow 4G network on mobile - has high rating
Where I find these blogs: I try to find some high traffic blogs running on Blogger, I pick some simple blogs (on simpler the faster basis), and check the official Blogger blog as that should be the baseline.
My old blog
This is the one to beat. Some 5 years ago I had a blog, lots of text, few pictures, no ads, very simple and content oriented. From performance perspective this should very well be in the top class of any Blogger sites.
As far as blogs go this is one of the best performances measured yet, let's see how it holds its own among the other Blogger webpages.
Blogger blog
This should be the best example. After the first look I can tell, they don't bother hiring a designer for their sites. User experience is hard to measure, but there are some best practices and widely used techniques that constitutes the basis of the field. Plain white background, simplistic fonts, zero decorative elements, very few things to interact with. The site doesn't even have a navigation bar. To be fair, my blog looks the same, and they're not only neglect updating the design of the blog, they are not even using it, as it has about one post a year.
Aside from the aesthetics, other big parts of the user experience are the performance and responsiveness. The page looks as good as it can on mobile, and it feels fast as lightning as well.
Performance, no surprise, still looks good, borderline worse than on my blog, but it must have more content as well. More concerning though, is the fact that both sites use outdated jQuery versions, and even these are different. The concerning about this is 1: it's vulnerable to attacks (moderately), 2: the sites are supposed to be managed by Blogger, thus should very well have the same updates installed, but having different versions on two blogger sites tells a different story.
Others
Finally I visited a dozen more Blogger blogs. In terms of mobile performance, responsiveness, modern look & feel I found the followings:
There are sites with nicely done user interfaces, high performance scores (in the mid 60s at least) and very thought through responsive mobile side. These are rather rare, and in some cases I haven't found definite evidence of them being Blogger blogs other than sites referencing them as such.
There are sites with UX from the '90s, zero mobile friendliness, horrible performance scores (30 and below). Mostly these were abandoned blogs with no recent post. Sadly not all were such.
There are sites anywhere in between these two extremities. Mostly blogs with responsive design got better scores for performance as well and were more pleasant to look at as well, but there are exceptions to that as well. I found a site where everything was in place except accessibility, and indeed the background has too little contrast to the foreground ruining the experience (just to highlight one that's critical for every reader).
Summary
Positive note
It's very much up to the content creator to make the website fast, responsive, and usable on Blogger. This way perfect sites can be built
SEO ratings are as good as on any blogging platform.
Better average performance than on the visited WordPress blogs
Page loading (hence performance) is highly dependent on how long the content is on the main page. For blogs with all their posts mingled on the landing page the average performance score and the perceived load time are both considerably worse than on those with less posts showing right at the welcome page.
Great integration with traffic monitoring and Google ads
Critical note
Most designs are way out of date
The platform won't do a thing for you. If you let your blog outdate, don't expect them to send any updates in your way.
Concerning security holes and inconsistencies throughout the blog family.
Limited customization options (both templates and layouts)
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