6 Great Ways To Reduce Your Mobile Page Load Time
One of the key elements of providing a high level mobile user experience is speed. Simply put, today’s users have no patience and do not wish to wait more than a few seconds for a web page to render or they will go somewhere else. The art of website design encompasses so many critical aspects, which include how to provide a great user experience. Today we will focus on the aspect of speed with our 6 great ways to reduce your mobile page load time.
While there is still a large debate taking place regarding the mobile web versus mobile apps, those businesses that utilize a website rather than an app need to do their best to replicate the near instantaneous experience an app can provide. The goal for every mobile site should be to render in under two seconds on any mobile network.
If you can do that, users won’t have time to get bored. So let’s get to some common fixes that will help boost your mobile page load speed!
The Big Six
- Edit images – Images are one of the biggest speed killers simply because of file size. Using image edit tools is a key to reducing the size while keeping the proper scale. Using the proper width and height will help them load quickly no matter the target device.
- Keep things small – Minimalist style means speed because less data is used to load a page. That means watching the total number of files that need to load, careful use of fonts, templates and heavy formats and using compression tools or other reduction utilities as much as possible.
- Use Google AMP Cache – Google AMP Cache is a free content delivery resource for people who want to make content AMP-compliant. AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. Data is stored and served out of their huge data centers that are located around the globe giving you a lot of bandwidth and making sure your content meets AMP standards.
- Reduce re-directs – Each re-direct creates an HTTP request. Each request means more time sending and receiving information. Naturally this slows things down. Some responsive design has an automatic redirect from a primary site to a mobile site, something Google is not a fan of. One solution is using an HTTP redirect just for mobile users.
- Check server response times – You should be regularly testing your server speeds to see how fast they are delivering the HTML of your webpage. If the transaction speed is more than 200ms then you might need to look elsewhere for a server provider. Google’s PageSpeed Tools can help check times rather easily.
- Use CSS sprites – CSS sprites combine multiple images into a single file along with combining JavaScript and CSS files. This helps increase speed on page loading.
The Bottom Line
The bottom line is that a lack of speed kills when it comes to the mobile web. You need to ensure you are doing everything you can for sub-3 or sub-2 second load speeds if you want to beat out the competition and our 6 great ways to reduce your mobile page load time provide just what you need to get started.
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