I want to provide some insights on a recent update we made to our sites here at the games group and how it benefits you.
Mobile Performance
We have been spending a significant amount of time researching and experimenting with ways to make the site “fast as hell” and we determined a couple of factors that played a huge role in slowing down our sites. One of which being the ‘critical rendering path’ and blockers that stopped the site from loading instantly.
Critical Rendering Path? What in the world is that?
In layman terms, the critical rendering path is a term used in the browser world that determines how fast a website displays primary actions to the user. There are certain blockers that prevent the browser from giving you a usable site in an expected amount of time.
How did we get around the render block of the critical path?
Through a concept called ‘critical vs non-critical’. We are serving up your critical CSS on load and lazy loading in the rest of the CSS. This prevents the browser from blocking the site while its waiting for the request back from our servers.
What to expect
With this implementation, you are now getting GameSpot content, the ‘critical’ content, the second your internet connections receives back a request from our servers. Rather than waiting for our massive CSS file to come back from the server. Trying browsing around on your phone from the homepage to news article, those are the areas we are experimenting with this implementation. You should expect significant improvements there. This effect will trickle into other areas of the site as we fine tune this implementation.
The reality is, GameSpot is a MASSIVE site and it’s doing a lot for you guys. This approach is rather new in the web world, especially for massive dynamic sites like GameSpot. If any of you experience any bugs related to this implementation, please feel free to contact me directly through PMs @stylyy
I hope this makes your mobile browsing experience more enjoyable :)
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