July 10, 2015
When we went to Hungary during the Christmas period last year I bought a 1GB data plan on a prepaid card. However, soon after I went online with my laptop the entire data allowance was used up. Strangely, I wasn’t able to add another data package. Instead, T-Mobile limited my internet access to 32kbps till the end of the month.
Since there was no easy way to fix it and I had nothing critical to do I decided to embrace the situation as an opportunity to understand how it feels to be on a slow network most of the time. I had already started reading the book Responsible Responsive Design at that time anyway so I was curious.
To be on a slow connection for a longer period of time can really be an eye opening thing if you work on the web. As Gabor mentions in his post it’s not only that pages load slowly, but some just won’t load at all.
I experienced the exact same thing in the last weeks when we were on vacation in Spain after WordCamp Europe. I had a 200 MB mobile data package, and at our AirBnB apartment we had a very slow WiFi. So i had to choose between a moody and sluggish WiFi or the tiny bit faster but crazy expensive mobile connection.
It was frustrating, to say the least. But if you work on the web, you should force yourself into this situation while developing. Gabor recommends to turn on device mode in Chrome and simulate a slow connection right from the beginning, because as he puts it:
I need to feel the pain as soon as possible so that I immediately notice the changes that are bad for performance.
This should be an exercise we should do on a regular basis and – even better – we should integrate them into our project workflows. Imagine if everyone involved, from your client, project manager, boss to the content creators would have experienced a few weeks of bad connection first hand.
I’m sure performance wouldn’t be an afterthought anymore.
Three takeaways for web developers after two weeks of painfully slow internet