Thumbs up for user experience, thumbs down for speed
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With Google's new mobile algorithm imminently approaching (21st April) I thought I'd run my site through the test, but I was really surprised with the results.
My opinion is that Nodebb is blisteringly fast, it's one of the reasons why I chose it because the pages load instantly, however the speed test says otherwise for mobile devices.
This isn't a criticism, just thought it might give some valuable insights.
65/100 - for mobile speed
100/100 - for user experienceGoogle has published guidelines that emphasize why sites should deliver above-the-fold content in less than a second, but add that ...
“…the whole page doesn’t have to render within this budget, instead, we must deliver and render the above the fold content in under one second, which allows the user to begin interacting with the page as soon as possible."
No doubt implementing this wouldn't be easy, but it might be worth considering for future versions.
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Keeping in mind that this is a machine run test, you must take the results with a grain of salt. NodeBB is quite zippy on my phone but (strong emphasis here), we're all using Nexus 5 devices and I'm on LTE, so this is hardly a common use case.
We render the entire page at once because we send the full HTML to the client. This means navigating NodeBB without js is a good experience, you don't get a degraded environment.
There are some improvements that can be made to the way our client side libraries can be loaded, so this is a focus for the next version.
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Keeping in mind that this is a machine run test, you must take the results with a grain of salt.
I'm looking at this from an seo perspective, I agree that Nodebb is "zippy" but if Google are going to be using this tool (or something similar) to rank Nodebb forums, then the results are highly relevant.
What's the point in having a cool looking forum with no members or visitors?
NodeBB is quite zippy on my phone
It's also zippy on my iPhone & iPad and my daughters Android tablet and Windows phone.
