When you are creating your own website, you might not think about mobile page speed being one of Google’s ranking factors. However, it is becoming increasingly important, and may soon become one of the top reasons a website does not rank on the first page of search.
Your mobile website is essential to how you communicate with your target market.
If your website is slow when accessed from a mobile device, you may have a problem with mobile optimization. To see if your website is slow on mobile, you can check your website’s speed using a tool like Google’s PageSpeed Insights. If your website is slow on mobile, you may need to optimize your website for mobile devices.
This article provides performance tips for increasing the speed of your mobile site, including optimizing your content for mobile devices. It also shows you how to make browsing easier for all visitors, regardless of the device they are using.
1. Choose Fast Web Hosting
The speed of your mobile page will not improve if you have web hosting that is not reliable.
It’s not entirely the web hosting company’s fault if its servers take too long to process and serve your website to mobile visitors.
It is your responsibility to investigate the provider and its infrastructure and to ensure that you have selected a plan that will facilitate faster loading times for your website.
Here are some things to think about:
Where are the web host’s servers located?
If there aren’t enough servers in close proximity to you or your target audience, loading times will be slow.
If you do not like the location of the servers your web hosting plan uses, you could improve your hosting by using a CDN. A CDN is a network of servers that are located around the world. This would bridge the physical gap between your website and its visitors.
A CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a system of proxies that delivering content to users based on their geographic locations. A CDN can speed up content delivery by caching popular content on multiple servers around the world. If your website will serve a global audience, you should consider using a CDN (Content Delivery Network) in addition to your web hosting. A CDN is a system of proxies that delivers content to users based on their geographic locations. By caching popular content on multiple servers around the world, a CDN can speed up content delivery.
Does the web host offer niche hosting?
For example, if you are creating a WordPress website, it would be beneficial to research which hosts have servers that are optimized for the CMS.
As inventories and traffic on eCommerce websites grow, the websites will need more processing power. Top eCommerce hosting solutions can ensure that mobile traffic and transactions are processed quickly.
There are also hosting solutions available for Joomla and Drupal if you are using a CMS other than WordPress.
Did you purchase managed hosting?
Managed WordPress hosting provides you with a provider who knows your CMS well and also helps you maintain your website.
It is important to maintain a website by regularly doing website maintenance such as checking for broken links, updating software, and creating backups. This will help keep the website running smoothly and help prevent any major issues from happening. If you are not able to do all of this yourself, you can hire a managed host to do it for you.
Even if you don’t choose a managed hosting option, there’s no need to worry. The tips below will show you how to do these performance optimizations on your own.
Is the web host known for technology stacks optimized for mobile page speed?
Some things to consider when looking at a host’s technology stack are the following: -Are they using industry standard software and hardware? -Do they have a robust backup and disaster recovery plan? -Do they have a good monitoring system in place?
- Do they use NGINX?
- Are the servers equipped with caching?
- Are CDN upgrades available?
- Do servers run on the latest versions of software?
There are several things you can do to make sure your server runs quickly. Doing some research before you choose a hosting plan can help you narrow down your choices. These WordPress hosts are known for being fast.
Is your hosting plan scalable?
Also consider how easily your hosting plan can be scaled up or down as your needs change.
If you can make a great impression on mobile visitors from the start, you can expect traffic to increase quickly. So, it is important to have a web host that can increase server resources along with that traffic.
Kinsta, Cloudways, WP Engine, and InMotion Hosting are all companies that offer scalable hosting options.
You may also be interested in:
- The WordPress Plugin Boilerplate 101: How to Get Started
- The Evolution of WordPress UI (Significant Changes From 2003 to 2021)
- WordPress S3 Tutorial: How to Connect WordPress to Amazon S3 Bucket
2. Update to the Latest Version of PHP
The PHP scripting language is used to create the back-end structure of WordPress websites. PHP code is always running on the server, even if you don’t write any code yourself, and can affect the speed of mobile pages if it’s not up to date.
When you first set up a WordPress website, your web host should automatically select the latest version of PHP. If you don’t have managed PHP updates enabled, you’ll have to keep checking for new versions.
If you’re lucky, it’s easy to update PHP on your own.
Log into your web hosting account
The following text explains that every host’s control panel is organized differently, so what you see here may not be what you see on your end.
That said, all you need to do is locate the PHP manager, like in this example from SiteGround:
Review the current PHP version
Look for the current PHP version used.
SiteGround automatically updates the server to the latest version, notifying users of the current version being used.
If you need to make any changes,select the one you want to use from the list of available PHP versions.
3. Optimize the Way your Code and Resources are Handled
The code and files related to your website can also contribute to how slowly your mobile pages load.
You should definitely take advantage of these performance optimizations and here’s why:
Code minification
One way to make your code more efficient is to minify it. Developers often write code in a way that makes it human-readable, with extra spaces, comments, and other formatting. However, this extra code only serves to slow down the server. To make your code more efficient, minify it.
By reducing the amount of code in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files, the size of the files is reduced, making it easier for servers to deliver the files to visitors.
Code/file combination
HTTP Archive reports that mobile pages require an average of 69 HTTP requests to be processed. To make this process more efficient, files should be combined when possible.
You can improve your code by stripping away extra characters and combining all your files into one. This is especially useful for large CSS and JavaScript files.
Gzip compression
A .zip file is a file that has been compressed in order to reduce its size. Gzip compression is a similar process that is performed at the server level.
Gzip helps to compress your HTML files and style sheets, making it easier for your server to manage a smaller number of larger files.
Eliminate render-blocking resources
In many cases, this is a premium feature in caching plugins. That said, it’s an important one to use as you’ll see from this Google PageSpeed Insights report:
One of the main issues with the mobile site’s performance is that there are render-blocking resources.
When your server encounters a web page with inline CSS or JavaScript, it slows down the loading of the page for mobile visitors by trying to process the CSS or JavaScript first.
This performance optimization feature allows you to load non-critical code after the above-the-fold content and data have appeared, making everything appear much more quickly.
4. Use a Responsive WordPress Theme
Your WordPress site will look great on any mobile device or tablet when you use a responsive theme.
The best way to know if the theme or the page builder is responsive is to check the preview of the site on different devices.
- Check the customizer or the options of your theme. For example, the Astra theme offers a mobile view when building a custom header:
- Start building your page and see the options offered by your page builder. Divi or Elementor page builders have this type of responsive section.
5. Optimize Images for Mobile
Creating images that look good on a mobile phone can be a challenge. Here are some tips: 1. Use the right format. JPEG is a good choice for most photos. 2. Crop and resize your images. Make sure they’re the right size for your phone. 3. Compress your images. This will help reduce the file size and make them load faster. Image optimization for mobile phones is the process of creating and delivering high-quality images in a format that will result in increased user engagement. To do this, you need to use the right image format, crop and resize your images properly, and compress them to reduce the file size.
We recommend you follow the following techniques to make sure your images are well optimized on mobile:
- Resize images to save bandwidth: 640 by 320 pixels are usually a good standard to follow. You can also keep the “4:3 aspect ratio” as a rule of thumb for your images on mobile.
- Compress images to make your files smaller: find the right balance between the quality and size of the image. The quality is not compromised in our example below, but my file size went from 517 KB to 70.3 KB!
- Choose the correct file format: WebP is the best image format you can use on mobile (and on desktop). It provides superior lossless and lossy compression for images on the web. The graph below shows the file size after compression.
What we can conclude:
- WebP offers 25% smaller file sizes than PNG and JPG – with the same quality
- WebP loads faster (due to file size) than PNG or JPG images.
Use Imagify to optimize your images on mobile. The main features include all the best practices we just listed:
- Resize and compress mobile images in bulk or one-by-one without losing quality
- Convert all your files automatically to WebP
Why not try Imagify for yourself? It’s free for the first 200 images you compress each month.
You can find a full list ofplugins to help optimize your images on our website.
6. Implement Lazy Loading on Your Images and Videos
This means that the images further down on the page or on subsequent pages only load when the user scrolls down to them. The final key to optimizing images for mobile is to use a lazy loading script for images and videos that are not currently being viewed by the user. This means that images further down on the page or on subsequent pages will only load when the user scrolls down to them.
The Lazy Load by WP Rocket plugin allows you to load images and videos on your website only when they’re visible on the screen. This can speed up your website’s loading time, especially if you have a lot of images and videos. The lazy load feature is already included:
7. Optimize Image Delivery with a CDN
To improve the speed of your mobile pages, it is important to optimize the way images are delivered. This may involve using multiple servers so that data can be rendered quickly no matter where in the world it is accessed from. This is the basic idea behind a CDN (Content Delivery Network).
If you want to optimize the delivery of your images on mobile devices, you should use RocketCDN.
8. Improve Time to First Byte
The goal is to show visitors something on mobile as soon as possible so they don’t think your website is slow. It’s about making a good first impression.
In order to have a fast website, you need a hosting provider that supports Gzip compression and a cache plugin. WP Rocket is a plugin that can help you with tasks such as cleaning your database, activating Gzip compression, and caching your pages.
Use WP Rocket to reduce TTFB.
9. Eliminate Render-Blocking Resources (JS and CSS)
When PSI tells you to eliminate render-blocking resources, it means that you should avoid loading unnecessary resources at the top of your site’s code. If you have a lot of unnecessary JS and CSS code, it will take longer for browsers to render the visible part of your mobile site.
One way to improve your website’s speed is to deliver important JS and CSS content inline and defer all non-critical JS and styles. Another way to speed up your website is to remove any unused code. WP Rocket can help you to load JS deferred and remove unused CSS:
You can also delay JS execution, which is often one of the main culprits for a slow mobile site:
As an alternative to using a WordPress plugin, you can use the defer and async attributes and apply the tags yourself.
10. Reduce Page Weight
A lighter page will load more quickly on a mobile device than a heavier page, which is generally caused by videos, images, scripts, styles, and fonts.
The best way to reduce the size of your web page is to optimize your images, use text compression (GZIP), and combine/minify your code.
Ready to improve your mobile site?
As more visitors use smartphones to access websites, it is important to optimize the website for them.
Some methods of website design and optimization that were effective for desktop computers are not as effective for mobile devices in terms of page speed.
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