6 Tips to Make Your Site Load Astonishingly Fast on Mobile
Are you struggling with a high bounce rate?
You’re not alone.
High bounce rates have proven to be the Achilles Heel of many online marketers. But that doesn’t mean you can’t do anything about it.
A number of things can cause bounce rates to climb up menacingly, but none affect it more than page load time. Therefore, if you want to fix a high bounce rate, you must first make your site load faster.
Not convinced that speed affects bounce rate?
Check out several facts below that prove the opposite. For example, did you know that:
- 39% of consumers will exit a website if images load too slowly or don’t load at all
- 74% of mobile users will leave a website if it takes more than 5 seconds to load on their smartphones
As you can see, speed is paramount for your survival as an online marketer. Get your site loaded quickly, or otherwise, online shoppers will soon treat you as an outcast.
And with three-quarters of American adults owning a smartphone, it’s not sufficient enough to make your site load faster on desktops or laptops. You need to ensure your web pages load as fast as greased lightning on mobile, too.
How can you do that?
Well, here are some time-tested strategies that allow you to put the pedal to the metal and get your site load amazingly fast on mobile devices.
1. Make Images Mobile Friendly
Before you take any other step to improve page loading time, check whether the images on your site have been compressed for mobile downloads or not.
Forcing smartphone users to download large images will make your site load slowly on mobile and use up excessive bandwidth. Therefore, compress and scale down your site’s images for mobile downloads without further delay.
2. Reduce HTTP Requests
When a user tries to open a webpage, her browser pings the server on which the webpage is hosted. Actually, this ping is simply an HTTP request for the content presented on the page.
When the site server receives an HTTP request, it starts delivering the relevant file to the viewer’s browser. Typically, a separate HTTP request is submitted to the site server for every file.
Photo by Caspar Rubin on Unsplash
You can improve your page load time by reducing the number of HTTP requests a browser has to make to load the page. To do this, you will need to minify and combine HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files.
You can minify files by removing all unnecessary characters present in them. Once you’ve done that, combine different CSS files into a single CSS file. Do the same for JavaScript and HTML files.
3. Defer JavaScript Loading
JavaScript lends interactivity to your sites, like buttons and their responses. That said, it can negatively affect page loading time by preventing parallel downloads.
When a browser encounters a JavaScript file, it will not load other elements until it loads the JS file completely. This, as you may guess, delays page loading.
To speed up the webpage loading time, defer JavaScript loading. This can be done by placing JavaScript at the bottom of the web page, just above the closing <body> tag. Now the JS file will be loaded at the end, after all the other elements have been loaded.
If your site is built on WordPress, you can defer JavaScript loading through a plugin, such as WP Rocket. After installing the plugin, just select the “Load JS file deferred” option.
4. Build AMP Pages
AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages and is a project led by Google, Twitter, and several other companies. The main aim of the project is to make web pages load drastically more quickly on smartphones and other mobile devices. Another advantage of AMP pages is that Google caches them faster than non-AMP web pages.
AMP pages are actually regular web pages, but they contain as little coding as possible. You can’t use some HTML tags and CSS elements in AMP pages. As far as JavaScript is concerned, anything not included in the specific AMP library is a complete no-no.
WordPress has many authentic resources that can activate AMP on your web pages. The other option, of course, is to hire a reliable web developer.
5. Defer videos
Often site owners find it hard to maintain the fine balance between offering a fast mobile experience to users and providing entertaining content such as video.
Photo by Gian Cescon on Unsplash
Obviously, as a website owner, you want to show engaging content to viewers, but the problem with video content is that it slows your page loading time.
So, what you should do? Choose either of the two?
No, not really. You can offer consumers both by deferring videos. Simply delay loading of video content until it is required.
Let’s say you have an embedded YouTube video. When you load the video with the page, it causes the page to load slowly. What you should do is, instead of loading the video along with the page, just render an image of this video when the webpage loads. The actual video will be loaded only when a user clicks on it.
In other words, all the elements needed to play the embedded video, which by the way are the files that slow your page loading, load only when they’re actually needed and not before.
6. Enable Compression
If your files are bulkier, mobile page speed will be slower. You can increase it by compressing HTML and CSS files, both of which have white space and repeated code.
The most popular compression method among web developers all around the world is Gzip. It is supported by most browsers and can reduce page weight by as much as 70%.
Incorporate these tips to fix the slow speed issue, which can hurt your online business in many ways.
