Glad to hear from Google! I wonder how responsive designs can be optimized for smart phones if your desktop site is pretty much loaded? For example, I redirect my smart phone visitors to m.mysite.com because my desktop site is bit heavy for smart phone users and I also use ads which internally redirects to other ad networks. If I show different contents to smart phone users that would hurt the spirit of "responsive" site idea. How do you deal with such situation?

My feeling about this is that it's another G "smoke and screens" exercise to get us going round in circles trying to achieve a one second ATF download time for mobiles.

Their analysis page doesn't appear to give an estimate of the current download time and that is the one thing which may well be of great interest. The advice given is so generic it seems to be worthless, for me anyway.

They appear to want me to remove my only css file until the ATF content is rendered - how can I do that? The css file controls what all the content looks like, including ATF.

They want me to use browser cache to display the top picture - but it will almost never be in a users cache for my website because the pic is specific to that page.

Thanks for the advice.

@nomis5 Most of the advice has been floating around online articles for quite a while. Much of that we incorporate into our client's sites and it works very well. The "less than one second" thing is very achievable but it depends on your site. ymmv.

@jojy I'm at a client site right now and can't really write about this but you can't take a desktop site and always expect to serve it to mobile and be happy. Mobile != desktop and things must be cut out or otherwise served at another time. If you must have a heavy site deliver the same content to mobile, you're doing it wrong and not doing your visitor any favors.

The "less than one second" thing is very achievable but it depends on your site. ymmv.

Tests have shown that every tenth of a second counts, Amazon most recently claimed that a tenth of a second equates to a 1% bounce reduction on Amazon though I'm sure it's not linear. Being as fast as you can be is always a good thing to strive for.

That being said I just wanted to point out relativity, your site speed vs your competitors. Are your competitors blazingly fast while you are a turtle? Being the turtle isn't a good thing online.

They appear to want me to remove my only css file until the ATF content is rendered - how can I do that? The css file controls what all the content looks like, including ATF.

Huh. This came up in a similar thread just yesterday. The assumption seems to be that a mobile user will only visit one page; external stylesheets start paying for themselves on the second page.

They want me to use browser cache to display the top picture - but it will almost never be in a users cache for my website because the pic is specific to that page.

Check the expiration period. They may simply want images to be cachable for a longer time.

:: quick detour to raw logs ::

Thought so. Most of my 304 responses are from Googlebot-Image.

:: further detour to Apache docs ::

###. Anyone know where they hide the defaults? Or is it up to the browser to make something up if the server doesn't say? Can't get the information from headers, because I only log those for page requests.

Server must render the response (< 200 ms)

Clearly you would want to avoid any external calls to other servers... like social buttons.

The thing to bear in mind when Google offers advice, is it seems to be 50% about what users want, and 50% about how it can save them resources spidering your site.

Saying that, the web as a whole would likely be served quicker following some of their practical advice.