LinkedIn Lite: A Lightweight Mobile Web Experience
Article Summary
LinkedIn shipped a 75KB mobile experience that loaded in under 6 seconds on 100 Kbps connections. Six engineers built it in four months.
LinkedIn's engineering team rebuilt their mobile web experience for India, their second-largest market with 47 million members. Facing 5.6 second time-to-first-byte and 500KB+ JavaScript bundles, they needed a radically lighter approach.
Key Takeaways
- Server-side rendering with Play framework, capping JavaScript under 90 KB total
- Eliminated 2-4 redirects that consumed 3.7 seconds on slow connections
- Used Fetch API for interactions, streaming HTML instead of client-side templating
- 4x increase in job applications, 2x sessions, 3x overall engagement post-launch
By shipping 85% less JavaScript and eliminating redirects, LinkedIn India saw 4x more job applications and 3x member engagement.
About This Article
LinkedIn India's platform was struggling with slow DNS lookups that took about a second to complete. Connection times regularly went over 2 seconds, and mobile users waited an average of 5.6 seconds just to see the first byte of content.
The team switched to Server-Side Rendering using the Play framework and Dust.js templates. They also brought in Parseq to handle tasks without blocking, which meant the browser didn't have to do as much heavy lifting.
After the changes went live, the number of sessions doubled. Job applications jumped up four times over among India's 47 million LinkedIn members.