While there undoubtedly are several factors impacting revenue, most experts say that business sites loading within 5 seconds earn almost double those doing it in 19, the average site loading time.
The study has further found that sites loading within 5 seconds have:
- 25% higher ad visibility,
- 35% lower bounce rate, and
- 70% longer user sessions.
That’s precisely why we need to be focused on mobile-first solutions to help our businesses succeed. After all, mobile speed has never been more important.
Slow Loading Speed Can Really Be A Problem
According to Google,
- 1 out of 2 people expect a page to load within less than 2 seconds.
- 53% of visits are more likely to be abandoned if the page takes longer than 3 seconds to load on a mobile device.
- 46% of people have shown displeasure in waiting for pages to load while browsing the web on a mobile device.
The 3 main factors slowing down sites on the mobile internet are the number of server requests, file size and the sequential order of page loading elements. So now we have highlighted the causes; let’s get to the solution.
How to Increase Mobile Site Speed
Measure And Minimize Your Server Response Time
Your mobile page speed is not only dependent on your code but is also reliant on an important tech tool called the server.
The longer your server waits to respond to a browser request, the slower your page loads on the device. Most experts at Google recommend that your server starts transmitting the 1st byte of resources within two hundred milliseconds of a request for a more optimal result.
Typically, there are 3 major methods involved in the elevation of your server response time:
- Improving your web server configuration or software.
- Enhancing the scope and quality of your hosting service, particularly ensuring you have adequate memory and CPU resources.
- Reducing the number of resources required by your web pages.
Use CSS to Load Images
If you want to hide your content images for mobile users, load them as background images through CSS and use media queries to hide them conditionally.
A variation of this technique is used by Amazon to conditionally load device-specific images.
Minimize the Number of Redirections to Boost your Mobile Page Speed
Redirects are nothing but instructions capable of automatically taking website visitors from one page to another.
Each redirect can eat up valuable milliseconds, resulting in a slower page load. This is particularly problematic for mobile devices because they are often dependent on unreliable networks than desktop users.
The first step to fixing this issue is to survey the number of redirections on your site by using tools like redirect mapper. If the number is too large, minimize it, or ideally, bring it down to zero for the best results.
Minify JS and CSS Files
More data means excess page weight. This will take your pages longer to load on a mobile device.
That is why most web developers worth their mettle know the need of optimizing and minimizing assets to increase the page loading speed.
“Minification” eliminates redundancy without affecting the display of a page. A wide array of Google tools can help you eliminate such redundancies including the likes of:
- CSSNano (for CSS)
- UglifyJS (for JS)
Instead of Images, Use CSS3
Drop shadows, rounded corners, and gradient fills – all of these features can be done through CSS, instead of images.
This can greatly help in reducing the number of HTTP requests thus, speeding up the loading time at one and the same time.
Use Inline SVGs Instead of JPEGs
Like data URIs, SVGs (scalable vector graphics) can be embedded on a page to decrease the number of HTTP requests.
These files can be created on a vector graphics editor such as Inkscape, Adobe Illustrator, etc. Once it’s created, you can open it up in a text editor and drop it into your code.
Note: To embed a SVG in your style sheet, you must convert it to data URI first and then proceed to the next step.
So that more or less sums things up. Hope you had a good and enlightening read.
Photo via Shutterstock
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