Webmaster level: Intermediate

Users tell us they use smartphones to search online because it’s quick and convenient, but today’s average mobile page typically takes more than 7 seconds to load. Wouldn’t it be great if mobile pages loaded in under one second? Today we’re announcing new guidelines and an updated PageSpeed Insights tool to help webmasters optimize their mobile pages for best rendering performance.

Prioritizing above-the-fold content

Research shows that users’ flow is interrupted if pages take longer than one second to load. To deliver the best experience and keep the visitor engaged, our guidelines focus on rendering some content, known as the above-the-fold content, to users in one second (or less!) while the rest of the page continues to load and render in the background. The above-the-fold HTML, CSS, and JS is known as the critical rendering path.

We can achieve sub-second rendering of the above-the-fold content on mobile networks by applying the following best practices:

• Server must render the response (< 200 ms)
• Number of redirects should be minimized
• Number of roundtrips to first render should be minimized
• Avoid external blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content
• Reserve time for browser layout and rendering (200 ms)
• Optimize JavaScript execution and rendering time

These are explained in more details in the mobile-specific help pages, and, when you’re ready, you can test your pages and the improvements you make using the PageSpeed Insights
tool.

As always, if you have any questions or feedback, please post in our discussion group.

Posted by Bryan McQuade, Software Engineer, and Pierre Far, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Webmaster level: IntermediateSmartphone users are a significant and fast growing segment of Internet users, and at Google we want them to experience the full richness of the web. As part of our efforts to improve the mobile web, we published our recomm…

Webmaster level: Intermediate

As more and more users worldwide with mobile devices access the Internet, it’s fantastic to see so many websites making their content accessible and useful for those devices. To help webmasters optimize their sites we launched our recommendations for smartphones, feature-phones, tablets, and Googlebot-friendly sites in June 2012.

We’re happy to announce that those recommendations are now also available in Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Russian, Simplified Chinese, and Spanish. US-based webmasters are welcome to read the UK-English version.

We welcome you to go through our recommendations, pick the configuration that you feel will work best with your website, and get ready to jump on the mobile bandwagon!

Thanks to the fantastic webmaster-outreach team in Dublin, Tokyo and Beijing for making this possible!

Posted (but not translated) by John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Zürich Switzerland

Webmaster level: All

Since we announced Google’s recommendations for building smartphone-optimized websites, a common question we’ve heard from webmasters is how to best treat tablet devices. This is a similar question Android app developers face, and for that the Building Quality Tablet Apps guide is a great starting point.

Although we do not have specific recommendations for building search engine friendly tablet-optimized websites, there are some tips for building websites that serve smartphone and tablet users well.

When considering your site’s visitors using tablets, it’s important to think about both the devices and what users expect. Compared to smartphones, tablets have larger touch screens and are typically used on Wi-Fi connections. Tablets offer a browsing experience that can be as rich as any desktop or laptop machine, in a more mobile, lightweight, and generally more convenient package. This means that, unless you offer tablet-optimized content, users expect to see your desktop site rather than your site’s smartphone site.

Our recommendation for smartphone-optimized sites is to use responsive web design, which means you have one site to serve all devices. If your website uses responsive web design as recommended, be sure to test your website on a variety of tablets to make sure it serves them well too. Remember, just like for smartphones, there are a variety of device sizes and screen resolutions to test.

Another common configuration is to have separate sites for desktops and smartphones, and to redirect users to the relevant version. If you use this configuration, be careful not to inadvertently redirect tablet users to the smartphone-optimized site too.

Telling Android smartphones and tablets apart

For Android-based devices, it’s easy to distinguish between smartphones and tablets using the user-agent string supplied by browsers: Although both Android smartphones and tablets will include the word “Android” in the user-agent string, only the user-agent of smartphones will include the word “Mobile”.

In summary, any Android device that does not have the word “Mobile” in the user-agent is a tablet (or other large screen) device that is best served the desktop site.

For example, here’s the user-agent from Chrome on a Galaxy Nexus smartphone:

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 4.1.1; Galaxy Nexus Build/JRO03O) AppleWebKit/535.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/18.0.1025.166 Mobile Safari/535.19

Or from Firefox on the Galaxy Nexus:

Mozilla/5.0 (Android; Mobile; rv:16.0) Gecko/16.0 Firefox/16.0

Compare those to the user-agent from Chrome on Nexus 7:

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 4.1.1; Nexus 7 Build/JRO03S) AppleWebKit/535.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/18.0.1025.166 Safari/535.19

Or from Firefox on Nexus 7:

Mozilla/5.0 (Android; Tablet; rv:16.0) Gecko/16.0 Firefox/16.0

Because the Galaxy Nexus’s user agent includes “Mobile” it should be served your smartphone-optimized website, while the Nexus 7 should receive the full site.

We hope this helps you build better tablet-optimized websites. As always, please ask on our Webmaster Help forums if you have more questions.

Posted by Pierre Far, Webmaster Trends Analyst, and Scott Main, lead tech writer for developer.android.com