Having a mobile-friendly website has quickly become the cost of doing business online. If a potential customer visits your website from their phone only to find a hot mess, odds are they not only will exit your site within seconds, but they will also look elsewhere for their needs — often running straight to your competitors. One of the key factors in having a mobile-friendly website is its performance. In other words, how quickly the content loads and how smoothly users can act. But what determines a website’s mobile performance, and what can you do to improve yours?
Why does mobile performance matter?
According to recent research across several industries, 53% of website visitors will leave a webpage if it takes more than three seconds to load. That’s not a lot of time! Your chance to engage users and persuade them to spend their precious time on your website literally comes down to a matter of seconds. Conversions, then, depend on your website’s ability to load quickly and deliver content to users without delay.
Search engines are not oblivious to this fact. Mobile performance has become so important among internet usage that Google now considers page speed as a key determining factor in ranking websites and assigning quality scores. This mobile-first trend means that not only will you miss out on conversions if your site is slow, but you will also be buried in the search results, and many potential customers will never find you. In other words, RIP.
Free tools to measure your website’s mobile performance:
5 Ways To Improve Mobile Website Performance
1. Compress Images
You can use premium tools like Photoshop, or free online tools like tinyjpg.com to compress the file size of your website’s images. Keeping the size of your images down will allow them to load faster, but be sure not to compress the images so much that it results in a noticeable loss of quality.
2. Reduce the Number of Custom Fonts and Weights
Every additional font family and weight added to a web page adds load time. While typography is essential to branding and design, you should be mindful of how font choices affect page load time.
3. Allow Browsers to Cache Images and Data
Caching reduces the number of new elements a browser has to load each time a user visits your website. If your site has a lot of media to load, this can go a long way in improving load times for returning visitors.
4. Keep the Design Simple
Flashy websites require a lot of custom CSS and JavaScript, which can lead to slow load times, poor performance, and an increased risk of elements breaking down the road. While you don’t have to be a minimalist, you should always consider the benefit of adding a design element vs. the overall cost to the website’s performance.
5. Remove Unnecessary JavaScript
JavaScript allows your website to do pretty much anything, but comes at a performance cost. While some JavaScript will be necessary for the functionality of your website, other scripts from tracking tools and plugins can add unnecessary bulk. To make matters worse, these scripts often come from third parties and make themselves at home in the background of your site, quietly adding time to your page-load speeds and performing no valuable function at all. Free mobile testing tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights will identify burdensome JavaScript and offer tips for improving it.