Customer’s expectations for a fast and flawless digital experience are on the rise and the mobile version of your website makes no exception as people use their mobile devices more and more when buying or navigating the internet. Statistically, more than half of the web traffic worldwide is through mobile. And the number keeps growing every day. Consumers in today’s digital market search for information online through their mobile devices. To secure your position in the market, you need to invest more time and effort in your mobile site.
Follow along with this article to learn how to improve the performance of your mobile site, make it faster, better, and more engaging, increase customer satisfaction, and revenue.
How to Check Your Mobile Website Loading Time?
Before we discuss the methods of improving the loading time of your site, it’s a good idea to find out how to check the loading speed of your page. Below you can see one of the most popular tools.
PageSpeed Insights
PageSpeed Insights is a tool provided by Google. It’s frequently used to measure the website loading time. It allows you to check the speed of your website on both desktop and mobile devices.
The only thing needed to perform the test is the website address that you paste into the box and then click “analyze”
The result is a score between 0 and 100 provided in two tabs (the first tab refers to the website loading time on mobile devices, and the second one contains information about the website loading time on computers and tablets).
Below you can see detailed comments about content rendering, as well as tips on how to increase website speed on mobile. This will allow you to find out what elements on your website are problematic and how to improve them.
How to Make Your Mobile Site Load Faster?
1. Optimize images
Images make up about 25 percent of a webpage’s total weight. Your web server may have a hard time processing all the large media files leading to a longer rendering time. The result is a poor user experience and a higher bounce rate. To optimize images for mobile devices, use smaller file sizes without compromising quality. You can use image compression tools to reduce file size while maintaining image quality.
2. Keep Redirects Down
Redirects are a must when you want to inform the search engine that your site can be found at a different address or if you want to eliminate the problems with subpages and links that don’t work properly.
However, too many redirects can negatively affect the website loading speed, as the server needs time to find the original URL.
Therefore, you should reduce their number to the minimum to ensure that they don’t affect the page loading and don’t discourage users.
3. Implement lazy loading
Lazy loading is a technique that only loads images or other resources when they are needed. This can significantly reduce the loading time of your website, especially on mobile devices where users tend to scroll quickly.
With lazy loading, the images are only loaded when they are about to appear on the user's screen. This means that images that are not visible to the user are not loaded, which reduces the amount of data that needs to be transferred and improves loading speed.
4. Minify Resources
Minification is eliminating unnecessary data from your web pages and script files without affecting the website’s normal operations.
The goal of minification is to improve site speed and accessibility by reducing bandwidth usage and loading time. It is highly beneficial, especially when using a limited data plan on your mobile device. Developers have a habit of leaving comments, spacing, and well-named variables to make it easier to understand the code.
While it may be a plus to anyone that works on the assets, it may not be favorable to the speed of loading your pages. Minifying CSS, JS, and HTML files eliminate the comments and extra spaces, avoiding additional network traffic with no added benefit.
5. Don’t Use Custom Fonts
How to make a mobile site load faster? Don’t use custom fonts!
Why? Because if you choose them, the server will first need to download them before it shows them to users. This means that website loading may take significantly more time.
Moreover, there is always a risk that the fonts won’t be displayed properly. For this reason, it’s recommended to rely on system fonts.
6. Simplify Web Design
if you want to guarantee your site’s best mobile experience, create a simple but responsive design. A responsive website is dynamic, allowing you to create one site for both the desktop and mobile.
It is also faster than a mobile-only website giving you an edge in Google rankings. It also attracts much attention as visitors find it very pleasing to the eye. Apart from having an excellent design, your website should also be lightweight for faster speeds.
Do not become too focused on making the site look pretty, as you may end up with too much code. Keep it simple and ensure that every detail is open and decluttered.
Why is Website Loading Time important? The Takeaway
The loading time of your website is very important because it directly affects the interest of your site’s visitors. According to research conducted by Google, 53% of users decide to leave a page if it loads longer than 3 seconds. This increases the bounce rate and consequently decreases your conversion rate.
It’s also crucial to mention that website loading time (on both mobile and desktop devices) is one of the Google ranking factors. This means that pages that load faster are appreciated not only by users but also by Google algorithms.
Fast-loading websites rank higher in the search results!