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')

The post Mobile performance and usability of Fortune 500 companies appeared first on Web Strategy for Everyone.

You can lay you hands on the e-book today, it is sent to you shortly after you check out your order. The printed book, though, will take a few weeks before it is sent. The e-book’s formats are ePub, PDF and Mobi, they cover virtually all mobile phones and tablets, and Mobi is specifically for you with an Amazon Kindle. If you’re looking for a different format I can recommend that you download the program Calibre, then you can convert to many more formats yourself.

The best offer is, I think, to purchase both the e-book and the printed book. It costs about 25 $ + VAT. Then you get 90% discount on the e-book.

Order the book at Intranätverk – from 10 $ + VAT ›

What is Web Strategy for Everyone covering?

It is 60,000 words and 80 pictures spread over 212 pages. The amount of images and the layout makes it not so burdensome to read, like many other similar books. At the same time it is written in a very ”condensed” manner and to the point, so it’s like most Swedish literature – rarely repeating itself over and over again. Or, as one reader put it:

”Recently read your book and it is an achievement how much value you have managed to put between the covers. Very good!”

– Håkan Liljeqvist, founder at Kreejt

The subject of the book may seem obvious given the title, but at the same time there is no real definition for what is meant by ’web strategy’. So I chose to make the book to cover the fundamentals in many areas a web strategist must know about. Partly, the Web’s history, a lot on information architecture, different approaches to web design, some about the increasingly hyped topic of web performance and last a do-it-yourself with hygiene factors to check on your own website.

Not just a translation from the Swedish original

The book is not really just a translation of my Swedish book. The English book has more international image examples and it turned out to be unexpectedly many cultural references that non-Swedes would hardly understand. So pretty much of the book is rewritten for an international audience.

Interestingly, several Swedish friends and acquaintances are waiting to buy the English book, despite the fact that the second edition of the Swedish book have been out for several months. Many Swedes, myself included, are probably more used to read in English and may have more benefit of an English version when in a multilingual business environment.

Better English in the book compared to what I write in the blog

A first turn of the translation work was done by a Englishman who is very knowledgeable in web development and intranets. After that, a language agency also had their way with the book to raise the quality even further.

Needless to say, my publisher has really invested in the book and I think it’s going to be great even for you guys having English as you with English or American as your native language. For obvious reasons we can not afford to make the same effort with every blog post I write in this blog, so do not be too quick to review its language if you find peculiarities in my blog posts.

Table of Contents

Since we’re not going to judge a book by it’s cover over the Internet I’ll share the ToC. Perhaps this content gives you an idea if you’d make use of reading the book.

• Before we begin
  • Why you should read this book
  • About me
• The Web’s history and future
  • Web 1.0 – a network of documents
  • Characteristics of Web 1.0
  • Web design 1.0
  • Web 2.0 – the engaging web
  • Characteristics of Web 2.0
  • Web design 2.0
  • Web 3.0 – a network of data (also known as the semantic web)
  • Characteristics of Web 3.0
  • Web design 3.0
• Information architecture
  • Content choreography
  • Examples of poor content choreography
  • Master Data Management prevents unnecessary duplication
  • The importance of marking up information with metadata
  • Metadata specification makes your data more standardized and interchangeable
  • Controlled vocabulary
  • Folksonomy
  • Architecture using APIs and open data
  • Public APIs, open data and the PSI Act
  • Background to the European Union’s PSI Act
  • Some take issue with the PSI Act – cumbersome access to data
  • What then is open data?
  • The benefits of an API for a startup business or when building anew
  • Design a public API with the developers’ experience in mind
  • Friendly terms and a free license
  • No surprising the developers with unforeseen breaking changes
  • Provide data in the expected format and in suitable bundles
  • Error handling and dimensioning of the service
  • Provide code samples and showcase success stories
  • Promote via data markets and API directories
  • What is the quality of data needed?
  • Microdata – semantically defined content
  • So, what is the problem?
  • The potential of semantic information
  • Microdata standards such as Schema.org and Microformats
  • Digital Asset Management (and Adaptive Content)
  • Adaptive Content
  • Image and media banks in your publishing system
  • Personalization of information
  • URL strategy for dummies
  • Common excuses for breaking established URLs
  • Ok, how to then?
• Web design
  • Gov.uk design principles
  • Start with needs
  • Do less
  • Design with data
  • Do the hard work to make it simple
  • Iterate. Then iterate again.
  • Build for inclusion
  • Understand context
  • Build digital services, not websites
  • Be consistent, not uniform
  • Make things open: it makes things better
  • Keep it simple, stupid – KISS
  • Do not break the web
  • Persuasive web designs (PWD) – design that convinces
  • Be clear in everything
  • Be very careful of what is the default setting
  • Visual hierarchy is important
  • Focus on the common goal you and your visitor have
  • Try not to overexert your users’ attention
  • Responsive web design
  • The mobile moment
  • The elements of responsive web design
  • Arguments for responsive web design
  • Notes on responsive construction
  • Responsive typography
  • RESS – Responsive Server Side
  • Adaptive web design
  • Design with data – a data first-approach
  • Get started with design with data
  • What you know about your visitors
  • Continuous A / B testing
  • Examples of A / B tests for monitoring the website, and other communications
  • Mobile first
  • Mobile first vs. responsive web
  • The mobile opportunity
  • Mobile restrictions
  • The mobile moment – when mobile users are in the majority
  • SPA – Single Page Application
  • Design of SPA websites
  • Challenges of SPA
  • Web standards, and usability
  • Progressive enhancement and graceful degradation
  • Usability vs. accessibility
  • Gamified design
  • Design and plan for errors that will occur
  • Your website is a magazine, not a book!
• Web performance
  • Planning for the unplanned
  • Performance optimization of databases, web servers and content management systems
  • General troubleshooting
  • Planning for high load – use cache!
  • Content Networks (CDN – Content Delivery Network)
  • Databases
  • Web servers, content management, own source code and external dependencies
  • Measuring and improving interface performance from the user’s perspective
  • Helpful tools
  • Editorial performance impact
  • Technical settings for performance
  • Recoup an investment in web performance – is it possible?
• Test your own website
  • How to document your test
  • SEO
  • Indexable for search engines
  • Duplicate content
  • Page title’s length is under 60 characters
  • Page title is readable and understandable in the search engine results page
  • Page title contains relevant keywords that describe the page
  • Correct headings are used
  • Search engine friendly URLs
  • Descriptive text on all important pages
  • Reasonable number of links
  • Pictures have alternative texts
  • Structured description of the information
  • Web analytics
  • Current visitor tracking scripts
  • Tracks the use of website search
  • Performance
  • Reasonable time for loading the page
  • Compression of text files
  • Usage of the browser cache
  • Scripts and style sheets are sent in a compact format
  • Images are optimized for fast transfer
  • Reasonable number of background images, scripts and stylesheets
  • Requesting files and pages that do not exist
  • Minimal amount of scripts and CSS in page code
  • Images are not scaled down using CSS or HTML
  • Identical files are not referenced
  • Reasonable amount of scripts in the page head
  • Content networks are used when necessary
  • Accessibility and Usability
  • Website validates the chosen code standard
  • Using correct header structure
  • Anchor-texts are descriptive
  • Link titles not used for non-essential information
  • Favorite icon is present
  • Possible to navigate with keyboard
  • Texts are written to be read by a human – not with exaggerated SEO
  • Language set in the source code
  • Not depending on browser features
  • Specifies image sizes in HTML
  • Works with and without the www prefix
  • Only one domain is used for the website
  • RSS subscriptions can be detected
  • Useful error pages
  • No surprises when scrolling
  • Enough distance between links, buttons, etc.
  • Acceptable text size
  • Zoomable, also on mobile
  • Icons for the website
  • Useable printouts
  • Others
  • Forms and other sensitive information is sent through a secure channel
• Tips on in-depth reading
• Sources & references
• Thanks goes out to…

Check out the Web Strategy for Everyone by the publisher Intranätverk. It costs from 10 $ + VAT ›

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