How to Make Your Mobile Site Load Faster

If you take a look through my articles, you’ll see I talk about mobile-first thinking a lot.

Why do I make such a big deal about this?

Because mobile is the reality of today’s digital world.

In fact, mobile is more important than desktop.

51.3% of all Internet usage is mobile. And that number will continue to grow in the future.

That’s why I’ve been advising my clients to focus more on mobile than on desktop, and that’s exactly what I recommend to you.

Specifically, you should focus on your mobile site.

A responsive site with unobtrusive popups is the current standard for mobile.

In addition, all of the regular website optimization best practices that apply to desktop also apply to mobile.

Today, the best practice I want to talk about is speed.

Your users expect your site to load fast. If it doesn’t, you could lose a ton of traffic.

How fast, you ask?

73% of mobile Internet browsers say they’ve encountered sites that took too long to load, and 40% abandon a site if it doesn’t load in 3 seconds or less.

Some research even suggests that if a page doesn’t load in the literal blink of an eye, people could lose interest. That’s about 400 milliseconds.

Not to mention the mighty Google takes site speed into account when indexing and ranking sites.

So if your site isn’t fast, both your audience and Google will think poorly of it. You’ll lose visibility and traffic.

So, how fast is your site?

Because if it takes longer than 2 or 3 seconds to load, you’re losing traffic right this moment.

It’s okay if your site is slow. There are steps you can take to make it faster to ensure you don’t let a single visitor slip through your fingers.

Test your site speed

Before you do anything else, you should test how fast your mobile site really is.

You might think it loads just fine, but it could be slower than you think.

One of the best mobile tests is from Think With Google:

Enter your URL into the search bar and click “Test Now.”

You’ll want to enter your regular URL and not your mobile URL if you have one (e.g., m.site.com).

We’ll test Amazon.com because it has a lot of mobile shoppers.

The test will analyze your site using a thorough set of tests and show you how well your site performs.

This process should take about a minute or two.

Once it’s finished, you’ll see three scores:

You’ll want to pay the most attention to the first two scores: mobile friendliness and mobile speed.

Mobile friendliness reflects how easy your site is to use on mobile. It’s an overall performance metric.

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