A Guide To Mobile Site Speed Optimization

With the mobile industry expanding at an increasingly fast pace and people wanting an enhanced user experience, it is evident that websites that do not adhere to user needs are soon to be overlooked. There are over 3.7 Billion mobile users in the world, the majority of them enjoy blazingly fast internet speed and prefer checking out websites on their smartphones. Don’t believe it? Here is a fact for you:

“In 2018, 52.2 percent of all website traffic worldwide was generated through mobile phones”

Mobile audience number is projected to cross the 4 Billion mark by 2022. If you are a business owner who hasn’t considered optimizing their website for the mobile audiences, it is time to rethink your strategy. Your business website needs to meet the industry standards if you want to stay competitive in the market. Some basic tools that you can use to check the speed of your website include Google Mobile-Friendly Test, Google Page Speed Insights and GT Metrix. My company ensures that all our client websites meet the standard mobile speed benchmarks. Let me share some of our tried and tested methods that helped us in increasing the mobile site speed of our client sites.

Make use of AMP

You may have heard this “AMP” term every now and then and might not know why it is recommended by so many industry experts. Let me explain what does it means and what it does - AMP stands of Accelerated Mobile Pages. It is a website publishing technology developed by Google to compete against Facebook’s Instant Articles. AMP helps in displaying web pages really quickly on mobile. It helps you control the way the content is displayed.

Sites using HTML AMP codes are seen to have minimized their bounce rate by curbing the search engine load times. If you haven’t implemented AMP yet, I strongly recommend you to go for it.

Learn more about AMP here.

Use a CDN server

A great way to boost your website’s speed on mobile is by caching content leveraging a content delivery network. With a CDN you can deliver the content using the server closet which helps in minimizing the latency, further reducing the site load time on mobile.

Don’t have an idea on how to configure CDN? Here are some simple steps:

·        Sign up with a CDN provider.

·        Add the details of your website.

·        Change the DNS settings to route the website traffic.

·        Update the record and save the required settings.

·        Soon you’ll start routing the traffic to your site.

Get a responsive website design

Google has now made it one of the major ranking factors – so your website needs to have a responsive design. Here are some more benefits of having a responsive web design:

·        Lower bounce rates

·        High probability of turning viewers into potential users

·        Better user experience

What more can you do

·        Use adaptive images that can resize itself according to the screen size. This will reduce the image load speed on the website and the site will load quicker.

·        Use conditional loading for your website. You can stop different types of heavy content such as maps, big images, social widgets, etc. from loading instantly.

·        Choose a single URL and avoid m-dot redirection.

·        Focus on user experience. Improve your website structure to cater to your mobile audience.

If you need help in restructuring your website to cater to your mobile audience? We can help you.

Use Sitemap and Google Web Toolkit for improving your website crawling

The ranking of your website depends on how well it gets crawled by the search engines. Crawling is basically done by these tiny bots that analyze your website and rank your website content based on SEO factors. Here are a few more things that can boost your website health:

·        Create sitemaps and ensure there is no duplicate content on the site.

·        Regularly update your content on Google crawl.

·        Ensure your site is HTTPS-secured.

Focus on using Touch events, Ajax helps too.

Focus on the user experience, your users won’t like it if they click on a resource and then have to wait up for the next page to load. You can use touch events. When applied on buttons they can reduce the load time and provides a better user experience.

Ajax can actually help in fetching data without refreshing the page in which the code is applied. This drastically reduces load time.

Reduce the Client-side processing

When it is about optimizing the site speed for mobile devices, it is imperative to take steps to ensure that client-side processing is reduced. To increase the efficiency of page processing, I recommend deferring of the below the fold content. Until there is an on-load event, these scripts can be deferred. Some scripts such as drag and drop events should only be initiated when the user initiates it. So there is no point in loading such scripts without any user initiation.

Conclusion

The goal should be to lower your site’s load time in mobile devices. The threshold of users losing interest in your site if it doesn’t load is just about 3-5 seconds. Which means if you don’t meet this threshold, you are going to lose almost 50% of your audience and your bounce rate is going to hit the roof. So adopt the above-mentioned methods I shared to boost your mobile site speed. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me.