Tourists Reading Your Site on Roaming Data

Planning tomorrow on campground Wi-Fi

A family from Oregon is three days into a holiday on the coast. Their phones charge for every megabyte across the border, so data roaming stays off, and they plan tomorrow on the campground's shared Wi-Fi.

A lodge's home page starts to load: a grey box where the slider will be, then the frame of a video player. A minute later the rates and phone number have still not appeared.

They give up and call the place whose page showed a phone number before it showed anything else.

What roaming and shared Wi-Fi do to a page

Summer visitors from the United States and overseas often travel with roaming switched off, or with a small allowance they watch closely. Many rely on Wi-Fi at hotels, campgrounds, cafes and visitor centres.

That Wi-Fi is shared, and in the evening, when everyone is planning the next day, it slows badly. A page that opens in seconds at the office can take minutes there.

On a slow connection, what matters is how much the page has to download, and in what order. Text is tiny. Photographs, video and scripts are where the weight is.

Where the weight usually sits

• A slider that loads five or six full-size photographs before showing the first.
• An embedded video, whose player downloads its own files even if nobody presses play.
• Photographs straight from the camera, thousands of pixels wide, shown in a much smaller space.
• Decorative fonts that some browsers wait for before showing any text.
• Maps, social feeds and booking widgets, each fetching files from another company's servers.
• Scripts at the top of the page that must arrive before anything is drawn.

Each is defensible on its own. Together, on a campground connection, they leave the visitor looking at an empty page while they decide whether to wait.

The essentials, in text, first

A visitor on a weak connection needs a handful of facts: what you are, where you are, when you are open, what it costs, and how to book or call.

Put those near the top as plain text, not inside a photograph or a slide. Text comes down almost at once and stays readable even if nothing else finishes.

Make the phone number tappable and the address a real line of text, so a phone can dial it or pass it to its own map without loading anything heavier.

Let the heavy parts wait

A page can be built so photographs and video load after the text appears, not before. The visitor reads while the rest arrives.

A slider can load its first photograph with the page and the others later, or only when a visitor moves to them. A video can sit behind a still image that starts it when pressed.

Resize photographs to the largest size they are shown at, with sensible compression. Visitors see no difference, and it is usually the biggest single saving.

Fonts and scripts that hold the page back

Some browsers hide text until a decorative web font has downloaded, so one slow font file can keep a page blank. A plain font for body text, with the decorative one only on headings, avoids that.

Scripts loaded in the page's head must arrive and run before anything is drawn. Most can move lower or load afterwards, with no visible change.

Directions without the embedded map

An embedded map is one of the heaviest things a small site carries, and on a phone it is awkward to use inside a page anyway.

Write the directions out: the highway, the turn-off, the landmark, the distance from town. Then link the address so the phone's own map opens only when wanted.

A visitor with no data at all can still follow written directions read on the campground's Wi-Fi the night before.

A worked example

A three-day music festival in the Interior draws visitors from across BC, Alberta and Washington State, and many camp on the grounds, where the Wi-Fi is a few access points shared by thousands of phones.

Its home page opened with a full-width video of last year's crowd, followed by a slider of artists' photographs. The daily schedule was a PDF, and gate times sat in a FAQ several pages deep.

On site, people could not load the schedule at all, and volunteers at the gate answered the same questions all weekend.

This spring the dates, gate times, site address and a schedule link moved into text at the head of the home page, and the schedule became a plain page listing each stage by time.

The video now opens from a still image on its own page, the photographs were resized, and the slider loads its first photograph only. The page was then tested on a phone over a slow connection.

Testing like a visitor

The office connection hides all of this. Test the site on a phone over the slowest Wi-Fi you can find, or on a weak signal, and time how long it takes to see the phone number.

Clear the browser's history first, because a returning visitor's phone already holds the photographs and fonts. Tourists are, almost by definition, arriving for the first time.

Note what appears after five seconds and after fifteen. If the answer is a grey rectangle, the order of the page needs to change.

Ask someone outside the business to try it too. They will look for what a tourist looks for, not for what you already know is there.

The counter-case

Where nearly every customer is local, on home internet and a Canadian phone plan, this matters less. Those visitors can wait for a slider, and many have seen the site before.

And photographs genuinely sell a lodge, a tour or a festival. Stripping them all out would make the page quick and unpersuasive.

But nothing here asks for fewer photographs, only for text first and images after. Every visitor benefits from that order, including regulars on a bad connection.

Lightening the home page

1. Load the home page on slow Wi-Fi with history cleared.
2. List the essentials a first-time visitor needs.
3. Put them in text near the top of the page.
4. Resize every photograph to the size it is shown.
5. Load slider images after the first one.
6. Put the video behind a still image.
7. Test again on the same slow connection.

Step three matters most, because it works even if nothing else changes: a visitor who can read the hours and tap the number has what they came for.

Another group of visitors who meet a site on lesser equipment, and what the site should still do for them, is covered in visitors who cannot go past Internet Explorer 8.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.