Everyone who accesses the web always seems to be in a hurry, making a website load as fast as possible should be a priority for webmasters. Speed is even more crucial when it comes to the mobile version of your website. Mobile users are typically on the go all the time, and they would have very little patience for mobile sites that take forever to load. So if you want to keep the attention of mobile users long enough to generate leads or drive conversions, your mobile website speed has to level up.
Keep redirects down.
Redirects slow down your site since it takes the server some time to find and retrieve the original document requested by a click on the original link, where it no longer resides. The additional seconds the process takes can increase your bounce rate, so minimize your redirects if you want to keep your visitors’ attention and business.
Use compressed images.
Huge images on your website mean it will take a long time for them to load. To speed things up, use compressed images and scale them for mobile instead. If you can decrease the number of images on your website, that would be greater. Even greater would be not having images at all except for essential graphics like the website logo or something.
Simplify your web design.
A website designed with all the bells and whistles looks very impressive. The amount of code it entails is mighty impressive too, making your site heavier and therefore slower. Keep the web design simple yet tasteful, and make your site lighter and load faster on mobile.
Keep use of custom fonts to a minimum.
Custom fonts look amazing but use a lot of JavaScript or CSS, which can bog everything down.
If possible, avoid using custom fonts, but if the overall look of your website relies heavily on them, you should at least limit their use to headings or any other important area of your site.
Activate Google AMP.
Activating Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages project (AMP) on your website’s pages will make it look great and load up real fast at the same time, regardless of device or distribution platform. AMP uses ultra-minimalistic HTML to speed up the loading time of the content on your mobile page.
Cut your signup steps short.
A typical signup process for a website entails six to seven steps. To speed things up, cut the steps down to three or four steps. All the code you’ll get rid of this way will make your page lighter and faster.
Turn browser caching on.
Mobile browsers can now “remember” your pages and save the data on your smartphone or tablet for later use. By activating browser caching, serving up the pages on mobile will be faster.
Minify your code.
Your website has a ton of code, and for always, some characters in it are probably redundant or completely unnecessary. Minify your website’s code by removing them, and effectively make your site lighter and faster.
You can do it yourself if you understand coding, or you can ask a member of your team who eats code for breakfast, lunch, and dinner to do the necessary minifying.
Do your mobile SEO well.
Google’s Mobile First Index is designed to use mobile websites as the basis for Google’s rankings and search listings. That should light a fire under webmasters with websites that have no mobile versions or have mobile versions that perform poorly on smartphones and tablets. The Mobile-First Index gives webmasters the motivation to speed up their websites since page speed is one of the factors of mobile SEO. Optimize your mobile website by doing whatever you can to speed it up, and you’ll have a mobile site that will do well on Google’s Mobile First Index.
Now give the above tips a try and see if your mobile website’s speed gets a boost.
However, it is recommended that you use Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool so you’ll know what actually needs to be done to increase your mobile site’s speed.
