Last time I posted about Blogger blogs' performance on mobile devices. They sure performed better than Wordpress blogs, speaking strictly about load times, but they also had some major areas to improve. It's time to move to the third main blogging platform, Wix. But first, 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.
Web Build Help
The first and most obvious choice to take a look at is this very blog. Looking at the home page I could predict the outcome of a slow mobile device loading it on slow network. Not surprise it's horrible, barely gets any points for performance.
Accessibility, best practices, and most of all SEO are looking good, only if the performance were better. How could've I improved it? In short, less content. Less apps, less plugins used, smaller and fewer pictures, a less exciting landing page. What I am going for instead is having a modern, stylish landing page, that grabs the attention (when it finally loads). And with Wix, it's more than possible, which is why I chose them. They have about 50 different blog templates to start living for your passion. It might sound like a shitty ad, but worth a shot checking, look anywhere on my blog, I'm not paid for my opinion. As of mobile usability, on Wix there is a separate editor view so you can fine-tune the small screen version of the site. And man, if you do, it's beyond amazing.
There are cool features like mobile friendly menubar and hiding desktop only content. The tools are all there to make a cool (sadly a bit slow) and mobile first blog, now let's see if other Wix blogs use it. There's an article in which Wix itself highlights some blogs to learn from, and I am really excited about what I can learn from them.
Other Wix sites
Most of the sites have the same tendencies as mine. The average performance of them is I believe the worst I've ever measured. I hardly found any sites with performance score above 20.
There were actually some lessons to be learned from these sites. At first glance they all look really posh. Then on the second attempt:
Transitions are great and all, but always mind to check them back or you as well might end up with one just like this.
When designing the page, always keep in mind, there is probably going to be a scroll on the side. Also worth a note having some margins added to elements near to borders or else on smaller screens or under different circumstances they might get overlapped just like the button on the picture. I myself have fallen victim to this on many occasions, and in many situations.
Just to emphasize the importance of the last point here's an other example, from the very same list. Keep in mind these are the sites that should be exemplary, and opening some of them I easily found this margin issue on multiple places. In this last picture you'd think the content can be scrolled further down, but actually it's at the bottom of the page. No important content is hidden, but it's still wrong to hide some text unavoidably behind a footer. But that's about it, I couldn't find any problems with the same volume as these, and frankly these aren't major issues either.
Takeaway
While having real bad performance on slow mobile devices, the user interface design, the user experience tools, and all the other features the platform offer try to make up for it. Also considering the fact that blogging on Wix is easy, like no need to worry about security updates (as was probably the case with Blogger), or that there are really few thing which could go wrong with the design, they make a pretty strong case for themselves to go with. Only if they had faster templates....
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