Is your website’s mobile performance hurting your retention and revenue? Load speed is one of the most important factors for user satisfaction, with an incredible 47% of web users expecting a website to load in two seconds or less.
If your website takes more than three seconds to load, 40% of users will abandon it instead of waiting. This means that if you sell a product or service through your website, just a few short seconds of extra loading time could result in a significant amount of lost revenue.
Many businesses focus on desktop performance, using tools like GTMetrix and Pingdom to get detailed information on bottlenecks that result in slow load speed. But what if most of your traffic isn’t coming from desktop or notebook computers, but from smartphones and tablets?
In 2015, Google announced that mobile search traffic had overtaken computer traffic in 10 of its primary markets, including the US. If a significant share of your traffic comes from mobile users, it’s essential that your website or app is optimized to load and perform quickly on mobile.
How to improve your website or app’s mobile performance
Before you get into the hands-on side of mobile performance optimization, it’s important that you have a full understanding of your website’s current performance.
Our crowdtesting platform lets you gain real user data on how your website performs on a range of mobile devices. For a quick and simple analysis of your load speed, you can run your website through Google’s PageSpeed Insights to find potential performance bottlenecks.
Bottlenecks are particularly detrimental to mobile performance because mobile users don’t have the speed of a dedicated home or office Internet connection. On average, the worldwide mobile connection speed is about 2mbps. The average desktop connection speed is 5.6mbps.
This difference means that a bottleneck that slows your website’s load speed by one second for desktop users can result in a significantly more frustrating three second delay on mobile. Every factor that slows down performance is amplified, affecting mobile user experience.
Add network latency (another major bottleneck) into the equation and it becomes clear that even small, typically inconsequential bottlenecks can seriously impact mobile performance. Add CPU, memory and cache into the equation and mobile performance suffers even more.
Luckily, it’s far from impossible to achieve equal performance on mobile and desktop devices. In fact, all it takes is some simple changes to the way you optimize your mobile website:
Start by scaling down images
Large, high-resolution images hurt your mobile performance in two ways. First, they consume a lot of mobile bandwidth, leading to slow load times. Second, they require processing power that isn’t always as available on mobile as it is on a desktop or notebook computer.
Start your mobile optimization process by scaling down your images so that they load faster, use less memory and require less processing power.
Limit total HTTP requests
The more files your website depends on, the more of a toll it places on mobile connections. One of the easiest ways to improve your mobile load speed is to lower the number of HTTP requests required to load your website.
Ask yourself: Is this file really necessary? Simplifying your website for mobile isn’t a bad thing — due to the limited amount of screen real estate available on mobile mobile devices, it also helps from a usability perspective.
Avoid overly complicated pages
On a desktop or notebook PC, a large page with several different sections, features and focuses isn’t a serious problem. On mobile, a complicated page hurts both usability and load speed due to its greater number of dependencies.
Instead of creating one large, complicated page, consider splitting your mobile content into more pages with fewer HTTP requests. This enhances usability by splitting content into smaller pieces that better suit mobile devices, all while improving mobile performance.
Review your mobile performance with MyCrowd
Are you worried that your website’s mobile performance is costing you money? Our on-demand crowdtesting platform lets you get helpful data about your website or app’s mobile performance from real users on a wide variety of mobile devices.
