WordPress SEO in 5 Minutes – How to Improve Mobile Site Speed?

WordPress SEO in 5 Minutes – How to Improve Mobile Site Speed?

Google’s new page experience algorithm goes live in 2021, and it has already adopted mobile-first indexing. With the internet becoming mobile-oriented, it is crucial to improve the performance of your mobile site. If your mobile site is slow, you will lose your customers to your competition.

This article from our SEO and branding team in Perth examines why mobile speed is important and what you can do to optimise your mobile site.

Read more on why mobile SEO is important.

How to Improve your mobile site’s speed

One of the key factors of a mobile optimised site is the loading speed. A fast-loading site on mobile reduces server load. It also increases conversion rate, as most mobile searches have a purchase intent.

There are a few things you can do to improve your mobile site speed.

Image optimisation

Unoptimised images can consume a large bandwidth while loading. It can also use a lot of server resources resulting in slow loading of the page. The three things you need to focus on when optimising your images are size, format, and src attribute.

Here are some useful tips:

• Scale your images to the correct size and make them smaller before uploading them to your site. 1200×1200 px will be ideal for both retina and regular displays.
• Avoid empty <img src=”…” />  codes; they can add unnecessary traffic to your servers.
• Use JPEG and try to avoid BMBs, TIFFs, or GIFs. Lower the colour depth of the image to the lowest acceptable level and remove image comments.

Browser caching

Browser caching means a copy of your site’s files that don’t change often are stored on the user’s device. This way, when the user visits the site next time, the site will load faster, as some files are already stored in the browser memory. The browser will download only new content when it comes to your site the next time.

Minify code

To minify code –

• Remove unwanted and unneeded code, thus improving your website speed.
• Remove all the unnecessary JavaScript files or scripts.
• Remove all extra spaces and line breaks.

By minifying code, your CSS files, HTML and JavaScript files will benefit dramatically, and this reflects an increase in your page speed.

Minimise redirects

Redirects may be necessary when a page is moved or deleted. But too many redirects can slow down your site, as they create additional HTTP requests.

Use Content Delivery Networks (CDN)

Your images and scripts can be stored on local servers, with a CDN. This reduces the load on your servers and also helps in loading mobile sites faster.

Get managed hosting

If your provider is not providing you with good hosting speed, it affects your mobile site’s speed. Go for a dedicated hosting or cloud hosting.

Remove unused Add-ons

Every add-on increases the PHP load time. Review your add-ons and delete the unnecessary ones.

Mobile optimisation is now an essential factor and most of it can be quite technical. Need help with making your site mobile optimised? Our professional SEO team in Perth can assist you. Contact us today or email at sales@computingaustralia.group and speak to our experts.

Jargon Buster

Managed hosting – where you can lease a dedicated server space from a hosting service provider, but they manage the server themselves.
Content Delivery Network – a network of geographically distributed servers leading to fast loading of websites and pages.