How to Speed Up Your Mobile Website

How to Speed Up Your Mobile Website

Website loading speed is no longer a desirable factor. It is a necessary factor. Loading performance is all the more crucial on a mobile device. Mobile users have lesser patience than desktop users when it comes to site loading. Our web development experts from Perth list out tips on how to speed up your mobile website.

How to Speed Up Your Mobile Site

Keep it Simple

On-page components like images, scripts, or Flash can kill site speed. Reduce the number of on-pages to those that you really need. You can always add an improved search function for further searches.

You can do a few things to simplify your website.

• Reduce the number of pages
• Identify the most important elements and add an improved search feature for other elements.
• Reduce the number of steps needed from visit to action.
• Get rid of Flash elements. They are speed killers and are highly vulnerable too.
• Wherever possible, use CSS images. Simple effects like rounded corners or gradients can be done with CSS.
• Use lazy loading for content, instead of loading the entire page in one go.

Change your Hosting Provider

Slow server times and inefficient hosting are one of the major causes of a slow loading site. If your hosting provider is not meeting your expectations, it’s time to change providers. Cloud hosting is the future of computing. Getting onto the cloud has multiple benefits, including better speed and security.

Optimise Images

Unoptimised images are another major reason for slow sites. This is especially true when sites load on mobile devices. Yet, this is one factor that many webmasters overlook frequently. Here are some tips that you can follow to optimise the images on your website.

• Compress images – Ensure that the images are cropped and compressed to the right size before uploading them on your site. It is advisable not to leave the image scaling to the web browser.
• Use the right format – Avoid TIFFs and GIFs. JPEG images are the ideal choice.
• SRC attribute – Ensure you have no empty src attributes to avoid unnecessary traffic.

Use Mobile CDNs

A mobile Content Delivery Network can speed up your website tremendously. A CDN is a global network of geographically distributed servers. These local servers work together to provide speedy content delivery. A CDN enables caching and many of your scripts and images are saved on the local server. The client server accesses content from the server closest to its location instead of the origin server. This helps in speeding up website loading times enormously.

Disable Unused Plug-ins/Add-ons

Many webmasters install add-ons because they are good to have, but do not actually ‘need’ them. Unused add-ons and plug-ins slow down your site. List them out and uninstall all add-ons that you are not using currently.

Minify Resources (HTML, CSS and Javascript)

Minifying resources means removing unnecessary characters from source code without affecting its operation. Minimising code and markup in webpages reduce load time and bandwidth usage.

Ensure that you save a human-readable backup of the file for any future changes. Minifying codes can break your site if done incorrectly. It is advisable to get a developer if you are not sure of the process.

Enable Browser Caching

Some of your site files don’t change often. When a user visits your mobile site for the first time, a copy of these files is stored on the user’s device. This is called browser caching. When the user visits your site the next time, the browser will download only new content.  The site will load faster, as some files are already stored in the browser memory.

Avoid or Minimise Redirects

With a redirect, servers take some time to retrieve the original file requested by the original link. This can cause your site to slow down. Redirects can be more annoying on a mobile device. In some cases, the redirected page may not open on a mobile device. This can cause bad user experience and the user may bounce off your site. Redirects may not be avoidable completely but minimise their usage as much as possible.

Avoid Custom Fonts

Custom fonts may make a site look great on desktop, but are not really needed for a mobile site. Plus, they need a lot of JavaScript or CSS, which can slow down your site. Simple, large fonts with enough white space make a site look uncluttered on a mobile device.

These points can get you started on how to speed up your mobile website. A lot of on-page and off-page factors can affect mobile speed. If you rather take professional help, The Computing Australia Group’s web development team can do that for you. Contact us today or email at sales@computingaustralia.group to get help on testing and speeding up your mobile website.

Jargon Buster

CDN – Content Delivery Network – A system of geographically distributed servers that delivers web content based on the location of the user.
Lazy Load – A technique where only the required sections of a webpage are loaded, instead of loading the entire page in one bulk.
Flash – A file format used to deliver digital video content.