According to Google, most online searches are from mobile devices. However, many global mobile users can only access the internet at speeds of 3G or less. That means if your website is slow to load on mobile devices, you will lose many visitors. For example, Google estimates that you will lose nearly one-fifth of visitors if your site takes five seconds to load (and that number goes up if your site takes even longer to load). You can find several online tools that will measure your site’s load time from a 3G mobile connection speed. After the test, if you find any problems, you can fix them to increase your mobile speed load time.
Site owners can make a good first impression on users by loading visible content on web pages first. After your visible content loads, your CSS and JS files can download. That way mobile users can see the content on your site before it finishes downloading. This will cut the amount of time mobile users have to wait before they can start viewing your website. A web programmer can fix this for you.
Compress Your Website Images
Often times large images will slow down a site’s speed (especially on mobile devices). For example, GIF and JPEG images aren’t formatted well for mobile web users because they take a long time to download. Unfortunately, if you compress those files, your image quality will suffer. However, you can compress PNG files without hurting the quality of images. Therefore, you should convert any GIF and JPEG files into PNG. After converting those files, you can then compress your images and speed up your site’s mobile download time. You can do an online search for PNG conversion and compression tools.
Minify your resources
In addition to compressing images, you can also compress resources. The most popular way to compress resources is with the GZIP tool. However, this is a more technical process, so if you aren’t comfortable with web programming, consider hiring a professional to compress the resources on your site. A website programmer can also use a process called minimization on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code to speed up your site.
Minimize Web Page Redirects
Landing page redirects will also slow down your site’s mobile speed. For example, if you no longer have content on an old URL but visitors still use that URL, you might create a redirect to send your visitors to your new website. Unfortunately, page redirects will slow down the time it takes your site to download on mobile devices. Therefore, you have to weigh the cost and benefits of URL redirects and measure how many mobile visitors you might lose.
Upgrade your web server
Finally, web server response time can play a role in mobile download speeds. If a mobile speed test finds that your server response time is slowing down your website’s load time, you will need to fix this problem. Unfortunately, server problems are usually quite technical and tough to solve if you don’t have experience working with web servers. Therefore, if you aren’t familiar with working on servers, you will need to hire a network engineer. This website is hosted by entexture, they provide managed AWS cloud hosting for lightning fast WordPress websites.
Conclusion
In short, don’t let a slow mobile download speed cost your site visitors. Make a good first impression on visitors by having your visual content (text) load first. That way visitors can start reading your content even if the rest of your site is still loading. Compress large files like images and your resources (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) so your site loads faster.
Avoid using any landing page redirects, so mobile users don’t have to wait while they get redirected to your site. Make sure that your web server isn’t slow responding to user requests, which can also hurt your site’s mobile download speed. If you are unsure how to fix these or any other issues with your website, hire a web programmer to fix them.