How To Make Your Mobile Site Load Faster

Today, more than 50% of buyers browse a site through mobile. Online shopping is being extensively carried out through smartphones rather than desktops. This trend is going to stay in future also. Hence, your primary focus should be enhancing the mobile version of a website.

Ideally, your mobile friendly site should be popup free and responsive. All the desktop features should be available in it. And most important of all, the site should load quickly.

We can’t stress enough how important is site speed for lead acquisition and SEO. 40% users entirely leave a site if it doesn’t open within 3 seconds. That means you are losing a huge traffic if your site load time is more than 3 seconds.

Slow site speed also hampers your SEO. Google can penalise and reduce your ranking for this. So, now is the time to fix this. This will be the first step to improve your mobile site.

Check your site speed and load time

We all believe that our site loads nicely. But the complete truth is revealed by running a test. There are many free and paid tools available online to check the site speed. Here we will talk about UberSuggest tool.

First go to the site and enter the website URL you want to check. Then click search. Next, in the sidebar, scroll down till you see the Site Audit option. Now click on Site speed. Here you will see the loading time of computer and mobile versions.

It also tracks advanced metrics like first CPU idle, input latency, time to interactive, speed index etc.

Remember, 3 seconds is the standard time for mobile sites. Even 0.5 seconds increase in it can cost you large number of potential customers.

If your site too loads slowly, and crosses 3 second limit, don’t worry. Below we will discuss the reasons for slow speed and find solutions to tackle it.

Design of the mobile site

Many years before, people used to design two separate versions of their website. One for desktop, and other for mobile devices. The URL of mobile version had a m before it. But this kind of setup could not provide a complete experience to the mobile users.

Nowadays, responsive design has emerged as the ultimate solution. This responsive site will change itself to suit the mobile or desktop view. The features will be equal to desktop and would load faster than ever. Due to better features than a mobile only site, user engagement would increase. Even Google recommends responsive designs for SEO. So, it is better to redesign your site to a responsive one.

Code Bloat

Code bloat occurs when your website code quantity exceeds the limit. Most of the sites do this to improve their visual aesthetics. Overuse of graphics to make a site look attractive can backfire on you.

Because, heavy code contributes to larger page size. And such a page would take longer time to load. Slow site is often the result of too much graphics and data on the home page.

A page loaded with graphics also looks uncluttered and unprofessional. The viewer will not get what you are trying to say.

Solutions:

1. Simplicity is the key

When you are building a mobile friendly site, focus on making it simple and clean. The display of phone is small so showing lots of info is not a good strategy. So, adapt a minimalist design like Rug Doctor site. Consider one CTA per page and highlight it in the best possible way.

As a result, your code quantity will be reduced and UX will improve.

2. Minimise the steps

Count how many steps you have in between your home page and final transaction page. The less the number of steps, the more you will reap. Like Boden’s site, you can complete the sales process in 3 steps- Add to cart, check out, payment.

You will earn many benefits from this design-

• UX would increase as the user don’t have to go through many steps.
• No unnecessary distractions for the visitors.
• Shorter sales funnel.
• Relief from code bloat= quick site speed.

3. Compress the pictures

We agree that images make your website more appealing. They are important SEO elements. But there is a downside to that. Images contribute 63% of a page size. The more images you have, the slower your site becomes. There are two solutions to this situation.

• Reduce the number of images.
• Compress the images.

The second step is more feasible. You will get free tool like Compressor.io on internet. These sites can compress your image just within few seconds. Don’t worry, the quality of pictures will not reduce.

4. Avoid using custom fonts

You want to use that attractive custom font on your site. But stop and reconsider your choice. Because most of the custom fonts have huge chunks of JavaScript and CSS behind them. If you use them, your site will suffer from a very low speed.

5. Minify the site code

Here, minify means deleting the unnecessary elements from the code of your site. Like white space characters, new line characters, comments, block delimiters. You don’t need to have code knowledge to perform this task. Checkout the site Minifycode.com. You will find here simple tools to optimise your JavaScript, CSS and HTML codes.

For WordPress users, there is a plugin known as Better WordPress Minify.

By modifying the code, your page size would decrease. And the site speed would increase markedly.

6. Remove the redirects

You may be using redirects for SEO purpose. But do you know that it can slow down your site speed? How?

When a server sees the redirect symbol on site, it again searches for the actual webpage. This searching goes on for a long time, because every file and image has to be located. As a result, the site loads after long.

By removing the redirects altogether, you can enhance your site speed.

Use a tool like Varvy’s Redirect Mapper to find out the redirects present in your site. Then track them and delete the unnecessary ones.

7. Lazy loading

This concept is an amazing solution for slow site speed. Here you will instruct the site to load the above the fold content first, rather than the one time whole page loading.

This is an advanced fix. So, if you can, do hire a professional developer. Otherwise use the plugins like this JQuery, BJ Lazy Load.

So, these were a set of expert recommended tips to improve your mobile site. It is high time to make these changes to your website because mobile users are rapidly growing. In return, you will receive a rich flow of traffic and better SEO outcomes. So, hurry up and make your site more mobile friendly.