In today’s day and age mobile devices have become extremely popular. The introduction of smartphones has the way we browse the internet. Mobile devices make up roughly half of the internet traffic all over the globe. In the second quarter of 2020, smartphones and tablets generated about 51.53% of all global website traffic, always staying above the 50% mark since the beginning of 2017. So, it has become very important to optimize and speed up your website for mobile browsing.
As smartphones become more and more powerful and capable, people no longer boot up their desktops or laptops to do all their internet-related work. Almost all of the websites on the internet are now accessible via mobile devices.
Mobile phones have become faster and faster over the years and it has become a challenge for websites to keep up with the speed of mobile devices. Time is everything. So, if your website takes a long time to load then the user might leave your website and go to some other website. At least 40% of users abandon a website if it takes too long to load.
As such it is necessary to keep your website’s loading speed standard up to the average user’s expectations. Here’s how to speed up your website for mobile access:
Cut The Extra Weight
A lot of people get caught up in making their designs too complicated and eye-catching to appeal to users. As a result of this, the website gets slower as more and more components are added to it.
Developers call this condition code bloat. Code bloat happens when a website is weighed down by excess code. Usually, code bloat happens because of focusing too much on the design and visual presentation of the site.
Also, don't forget to check out our article on How to Write Readable Code.
Although the design is an important aspect of any website, you can’t overlook performance. There should be a perfect balance between the design and performance of a website.
Use Image Compression
Compressing your image files can go a long way in making your website faster, snappier, and more responsive. Smaller sized images take less time to load. You can compress almost all PNGs, GIFs, and JPEGs by 30-40%. Mobile website speed depends heavily on image size, and the lost details aren’t visible on mobile anyway.
Switch Servers If Needed
If you feel like your current website server is not fast enough to keep up with your website, feel free to switch to another server. Do a lot of research and read reviews from other people before settling on a host.
Not all hosting providers are the same and some are faster than the others.Better and faster servers will be more expensive but customer satisfaction should take precedence as long as it isn’t too taxing on your budget.
Try Not To Redirect Your User as Often
Making your user “redirect” or “travel” from one URL to another takes up a lot of precious time. The clock is always ticking and it makes your customer wait too long. These redirects leave them unsatisfied or even force them to abandon the website altogether.
Use SSDs
SSD, or Solid-state drives, are the latest technological advancement in the field of digital storage. SSDs are at least 4 times faster than a traditional hard disk drive. Servers with the latest and greatest SSDs can give a huge performance boost to your website and decrease the load time by up to 20 times.
SSDs are also more shock resistant and run at lower temperatures and also have less latency compared to an HDD.
Load Above-The-Fold Content First
The Above-The-Fold content of your website includes visual components such as fonts, CSS styles, and images. You should prioritise loading visual content before “Below-The-Fold”. The user is less likely to leave your website once the website loads its visuals components and the user can interact with it while the rest of the website loads in the background.
Remove Scripts That Block Rendering
Certain Javascripts and stylesheets can interfere with or block the loading of your Above-The-Fold content which leads to the slowing down of the website. Eliminating these scripts can help your website load faster. There are even services like NoScript that take out scripts from websites automatically.
Measure Round-Trip Times
Round Trip Time(RTT) is the time it takes for a pulse to travel from the user’s mobile or desktop computer to a target destination and then back. RTT is most of the time measured in milliseconds and depends on a lot of factors such as server response time, the physical distance of the server from the user, the amount of traffic on the network, the way of transmission of data, and the number of network hops.
Browser Caching
Browser caches are basically a copy of the files of your website which are stored on the user’s mobile device. These files are stored on the user’s device when they visit the website for the first time and if the user comes back again the files are already stored on the user’s device and the website loads way faster than it was loaded the first time.
Caches take up a lot of storage on the user’s device and the user can erase them anytime if they wish to.
Use Fewer HTTP Requests
HTTP requests reduce mobile website speed by a lot. A request occurs when a browser asks the server for HTML or CSS files. The more components you have on your mobile website such as images, Flash, stylesheets, or scripts the more requests it will send to the server, which will increase the load time.
Remove Outdated Add-ons
Add-ons increase the PHP load time so it is important not to have useless or unused add-ons on your website. These add-ons increase the loading speed of your website. If your site is not using these plugins then you should remove them to decrease the loading time of your website.
As more and more users are shifting to mobile devices for browsing the internet, it has become crucial for web developers to increase the browsing experience of the users. The aforementioned tips and tricks should help you increase your website’s speed and loading times significantly.
