Website speed is one of the greatest elements for user experience and SEO. The website acts as an identity for your business so it should be perfect in all aspects. The developers are already doing various things to optimize the front end performance that includes CDNs, clean coding practices, minification, image optimization, fast web hosting, image optimization, and more. So the next important thing to focus on is the mobile site speed optimization of the slow website. Here we are referring to both desktop and mobile loading speed but in the following blog, we will be focusing on the speed optimization of mobile websites:

What Slow Mean on Mobile Web?

 

You can use various tools to analyze page speed and various fixes that are implemented to improve them. One of the helpful tools for web developers is the Lighthouse. Other than this, designers can use other Google testing tool for mobile online speed test called Test My Site.

This is especially for those who want to get an instant evaluation of their mobile website speed. You just have to enter your domain name into the field and then run the test. It was told that visitors are willing to wait three seconds for a web page to load. Google will consider 2.9 seconds too long and everyone has to accept it.

5 Things to Do for Optimizing Mobile Sites for Speed

 

Wondering, how can I increase my website speed on mobile? You will get the answer to this question in this blog. Let your web developer handle all necessary speed optimization like caching and file minification while you can take of following design tips and strategies:

1- Host Fonts Form a CDN

 

There are many things that you have to hear when it comes to designing fonts for mobile experience. To make your understanding better regarding mobile web optimization, we will be discussing a case study below:

Downtime Monkey Example

 

According to this case study, Downtime Monkey boosts a page speed improvements of 58% through a variety of optimizations. For the font awesome icons, they load a font from CDN. The Font Awesome CDN proved to be unreliable so they switch to Bootstrap CDN. This saved them between 200 to 500 milliseconds per page load.

For Google Font Cabin, they decided to host it from Google CDN. Here’s a funny thing, when they ran a page speed on the site after this, they received page optimization suggestion related to the font.

It seems that the link they added in head of their site was slowing down the rendering of the page. So they have to come up with a thing that allows the font to load asynchronously without affecting the display.

2- Avoid Use of Cumbersome Design Elements

 

Having a question, how do I optimize my website for mobile? For this, you should remove the unnecessary design elements as one of the ways for optimizing the mobile experience. You need to focus on the following things:

Get Rid of On-page Ads: For the beginners, advertisement is served from a third party. When you call another third party servers, you are increasing your own loading times as you will wait for them to deliver the content of your page. For your information, 36% of the US population is using ad-blocking technology on their devices.

You should use monetization to advertise away from your website, this increases your own on-site conversion and will not drain your server’s resources:

Remarketing: Let your tracking pixel follow the visitors around the web and then serve your ads on someone else’s website.

Social Media Ads: They are easy to run if your website is publishing new content on a regular basis.

PPC: You can make good money here if you can understand the pay per click advertising formula in Google.

Prevent Pop-Ups: Google says that mobile pop-ups are okay in some cases. But if you are building a website with WordPress or another content management system and using a plugin for those pop-ups, then you are slowing down your loading times.

Stop with Cumbersome Contact Channels: Don’t forget about the website’s contact channel. You should be careful about designing mobile forms. This is important to know how much time is required to fill one out. Furthermore, the length of your page form will have an effect on your loading speed.

Generally, you should be adding all the necessary things in your mobile forms. You can also use Chatbots instead of mobile forms for mobile website optimization. Website is now removing mobile forms and they are placing email addresses, phone numbers, FAQS so that customers can get in touch with them.

3- Creating Single Page Website

 

You can easily implement the above tips but you should do it when your client complains about the slow loading speed of your website. However, if your website is still taking more the 2.5 seconds to load, then you should consider a different approach to redesign your websites for speed optimization.

What is the one-page website? It is a single-page website that uses only one HTML page. Most of the professional designers will choose a single-page design over multi-page design for specific purposes. If you are planning to convert a multi-page website into a single page, then you should do it only if your clients fulfill certain criteria:

•       Business with an extremely narrow and singular focus.

•       A limited range of keyword you need to rank for.

•       A website that doesn’t need much content to get your point across.

If you are going to design the website to fit these needs, then you should move your website to a simplistic single-page design. The single-page website allows you to be more functional with fewer things but ensure it is mobile-friendly website design. With limited content and features, you should create a lightweight website. Furthermore, if you are planning to push your limits, then you should create a faster-loading website for mobile. The design of your website need to be super focused and simple with fewer animation effects to enhance the loading speed of your mobile website.

4- Turn Mobile Site into PWA

 

PWA stands for Progressive Web Apps. According to Google, three characteristics define every PWA:

• Reliability
• Fast
• Engaging

If you are having a problem in speeding up your website after implanting all of the traditional performance optimizations, then it will be good to turn your mobile into a PWA. Remember that for the beginners, the PWA is better looking and easy to navigate on the smartphone. Some companies have tried this and the results they got are AMAZING. One of the hotels named as River North Hotel after switching to PWA sees an increase of 300% in earnings and a 500% increase in night booking. 

5- Convert Your Blog or Website to AMP

 

We should be thankful to Google for another speedy design trick for the mobile web. This is known as Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP. It was initially released to assist publishers to strike down their blog or new page for faster loading on mobile devices. In addition to this, AMP is the web component framework that you can use to design a whole website or some specific parts.

Reasons AMP Load Faster

 

1- With AMP, you can load asynchronous JavaScript and inline CSS on your website. This means your code won’t be blocked or delay page rendering.

2- Images load slowly but in AMP this is not a problem. The issue is resolved by automatically loading the page layout before the resources.

The basic idea is that it cuts out the elements that tend to drag website down and force designers to depend on lightweight HTML for building their pages.

Gizmodo is one of a good example for AMP content. It is a known fact that when Gizmodo made the transition in 2016, there was a huge lift in terms of performance. The page speed increased by 30% and it got 50% more page impression as an instant result.

Wrapping Up

 

Google reward mobile website over the desktop website. All versions of your website especially the mobile one should be optimized for the best user experience. This means that code, design, content, and everything should be optimized well to move things ahead in the right direction.

It is very important to identify the problems and then try to eliminate the problems one by one. It is the duty of both the designer and developer to work together and do every possible thing for speed optimization. 
If you find this difficult, then you can get professional help. You can connect with TopNotch Innovative Technologies, a Boston MA web design agency to speed up the mobile websites through professional designers and developers. The experts will properly look at your business requirement so that they can design everything according to your business needs. After complete analysis of your website, our team will come up with the best plan to speed up your website.