Do we still have that digital head start that we fought so hard for in the 1990s? Obviously, this blog post won’t give a definitive answer to that question. But this is my contribution to the subject of an eventual Scandinavian lead in the mobile industry and perspective on mobile tech, usability and the need for speed. How do Sweden as a nation compare to the US regarding the, once again, popular concept of “digitization”. Well, this post is a attempt to start comparing, and to give you as a reader some data to begin benchmarking your website against the really big companies of Fortune 500, and the biggest ones of Sweden.

My book, Web Strategy for Everyone, deals with the issues of both speed and user needs when on mobile. Also a lot on design principles such as mobile first, responsive web design, adaptive, single page applications (SPA) and progressive web apps. Buy the book Web Strategy for Everyone directly from the publisher Intranätverk.

This comparison is how well major Swedish companies embraced usability and website speed. Today, we’re in a mobile first setting. Often attributed to the release of the Apple Iphone back in 2007. Almost ten years ago Apple contributed to – in a major way – making the Web accessible to mobile, for the masses!

Benchmarking method: OMX Stockholm 30 duel with the financial magazine Fortune’s list of America’s 500 largest companies

Since Sweden is a pretty small country, I have selected the 30 biggest companies on the Stockholm Stock Exchange in 2016, the so-called OMXS30. In the contending ring corner, for the US, is the 500 largest US companies according to the financial magazine Fortune. Biggest based on their annual turnover. No method is perfect, this one is no exception. But on some level, this comparison is the giants from one country to the giants from another.

Since the company Atlas Copco is listed twice on the Swedish list, there’s just 29 companies. The same problem exists multiple times with the Fortune 500, for instance the different incarnations of Time Warner, and others. In addition, this type of test is blocked by the security settings of some websites. That’s why the Fortune 500 simply became “Fortune 425” in this evaluation. Still, I think there is probably enough data to suffice as an acceptable average. But of course, it’s up to you to reflect upon the precision and if it is good enough for what you decisions you intend to make based on these data.

Measuring rod = Google PageSpeed API

The analysis is based on Google’s API called PageSpeed. If you’d like to make spot checks on any single webpage Google’s PageSpeed Insights web service will prove useful. The difference is that, with the API, one can automate checks of up to 25,000 pages per day. Thus one can approach a more quantitative analysis.

For those of you who want to know how much data is the basis of the analysis, there were 2,155 webpages evaluated for the 29 Swedish websites. For the American companies I evaluated 28,162 webpages from the 425 websites.

The average values were then stored as per website, which you can inspect in the Excel file linked below. After this, all Swedish companies’ averages were calculated, as well as all US companies averages, in order to be compared. It’s the way you should regard the tables below – as averages first calculated per site, then combined averages for OMXS30 as well as for F500. This double average calculation is necessary since the sampling of the websites differed.

Below is how an average webpage looks like. Besides Pagespeed and Usability, low numbers are generally a good thing.

Potential for improvement

As a bonus, when using Google PageSpeed via the API we get figures on what can be improved. In this comparison, the relative improvement is Google’s suggestion to the average Fortune 500 company website. Averages are calculated just like mentioned above.

Low figures are to be preferred, it means that the craftsmanship of the website is a professional one. The measures are pretty much obvious to the web professional, but please refer to Google PageSpeed API dokumentation for reference.

Being a Swede, I might after all be a tiny-wee bit biased, but I’d like to claim that the almost imperceptible country of Sweden came out as a the winner of this comparison.

What do you think? Give me your best counter-arguments in the comments!

Some things on these lists are easier to resolve than others. When you do this kind of evaluation on your own website, you might find a treasure trove of easy improvements. Such as, on this list, we find enabling GZip and leveraging browser cache early on in the list. Some things are very easy to resolve. For instance, dramatically improving those two takes about an hour each. Its all about the configuration of the website in the file .htaccess for WordPress, or web.config in a Microsoft environment, for instance.

More about the evaluation

For those of you who want to inspect the data behind the result, I have compiled an Excel file. In the Excel file you can filter individual websites’ performance, or comparing metrics for the different websites. Check out the Excel file here

You’d like to learn more about web performance?

Want to learn more about the variety of tools? Well, I’m pretty biased but perhaps you’d like the book Web Strategy for Everyone. In addition to its introduction to the Web, information architecture and web design principles It also discusses web performance and tooling.

In stark contrast to most English books, Web Strategy for Everyone is more dense, rich in insight, less repetitive. That’s how we Scandinavians roll

Buy the book about web strategy and performance optimization from the publisher intranätverk

Challenge: Earn your discount

If you’d like a coupon code worth 25 % discount on all books at Intranätverk’s bookstore, all you have to do is figure out below Python rebus ( yeah, it’s a simple concatenation):

‘{}{}{}’.format('friends', 'of', 'intranatverk')

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Where I work, our public facing website went responsive in 2012, but our intranet is still lagging behind. Well, on the few occasions when I create content for our intranet I manually input code to make my images responsive. 

Why responsive images on a non-responsive intranet?

It might not make sense to everyone why you’d like the images responsive when the intranet itself is not. One argument is that you like the image to fill the available width, not caring what that width might be. Some intranets is actually fluid in their grid system, but not responsive in their imagery, making for a less than optimal design with today’s standards.

Also, some of your users might have a high resolution screen. For them some images look blurry compared to the adjacent text. You can alleviate that blurriness with an unnecessarily high-res image, which by CSS-code is made to fit the width of its container.

The code to accomplish this is actually not that complicated, at least if you settle with an image scaling down in accordance with the column width it resides in. The most difficult part of this operation might be locating the image in the HTML-code in your CMS editor.

Images are tagged with a <img> tag. Your job is to figure out of its the right image, and if it is, then look out for an existing style-attribute. If there is none you paste the code below inside the <img> tag.

style="max-width: 100%; height: auto;"

Afterwards, it can look like this:

<img src="myphoto.jpg" alt="Fabulous photo of mine" 
style="max-width: 100%; height: auto;">

This instructs the web browser to let the image use all available horizontal space and the height automatic – keeping the aspect ratio, that is.

Potential problems

Perhaps, the most obvious potential problem is that you happened to mistype or alter the code in a way that is not according to the HTML-specification. If the image disappeared when switching back to WYSIWYG-mode you probably messed up the code, then switch back to the code and look through the code carefully.

If your <img> tag is stating width or height attributes like the code example below, then you have to remove that part for the style attribute to be effective.

<img src="myphoto.jpg" alt="Fabulous photo of mine" 
height="300" width="500">

If you still struggle with making your images responsive, please post a comment and I’ll try to help out. Whether or not your <img> tag is ended with a /> or just a > is contingent if your website is using the XHTML standard or the HTML standard. When in doubt, include another image using your CMS and look for yourself how the CMS prefers it. Most tools I’ve used don’t really mind how you write code in this regard.

Going all in with responsive images

There is much more you can do to achieve responsive images. For instance, you can serve different images for different sized screens. Smaller screens often need cropped images for the content to be conceivable, while you can serve a similar image to tablets and large screens. Also, you can serve high resolution images to retina screens, especially on intranets since bandwidth rarely is an issue.

The most apparent advantage working with intranets is that you now more about the user’s context, and their equipment tend to be somewhat standardized. So going all in with high resolution images for users with big screens is a decision easier made compared to the public Web.

Some of the responsiveness need support in you CMS. To learn more about the possibilities of responsive images, and responsive web design in general, check out the brand new book Web Strategy for Everyone – initially released with an extra friendly price ›

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