8 Simple Tips for Mobile Site Speed Optimization

What Makes for Good Mobile Page Speed?

According to Google, the average mobile loading speed for landing pages stood at 22 seconds in 2017 and dropped to 15 seconds in 2018. It also indicated that there’s a direct correlation between mobile page speed optimization and bounce rates, with faster loading speeds resulting in lower bounce rates. Mobile web performance has improved considerably since then, as you may see from these numbers collated by HubSpot.

• The average mobile page speed in 2023 was 8.6 seconds, and it was 2.5 seconds for desktops.
• In 2023, 85% of B2B websites took less than five seconds to load.
• B2B websites that load in one second have five times better conversion rates than ones that load in 10 seconds.
• eCommerce websites that take one second or less to load have 2.5 times better conversion rates than ones that take five seconds.

Google shares best practices that you may turn to if you wish to optimize web speed for mobile devices.

• Average speed index (how quickly a user can view content) – Less than three seconds
• Average time to first byte (how quick and responsive a server is in a given category) – Less than 1.3 seconds
• Average request count (how many individual content pieces the page needs to display) – Less than 50
• Average page weight (how heavy a page is, in bytes) – Less than 500 KB

Carrying Out a Mobile Site Speed Test

Finding out what measures you need to take to make a mobile site load faster requires testing its mobile loading speed first. While you might feel your website loads quickly enough, that might not be the case. Fortunately, you may carry out a mobile website speed test by using free online tools.

You may run the GTmetrix mobile test through its website, and you may also add it as a plugin to your website’s dashboard. Its report gives you an indication of total page size and loading time, and it also highlights which parts of your website require optimization. Some of the other popular tools you may use to test mobile website speed include:

• DareBoost
• Google Analytics
• Google Mobile Website Speed Testing Tool
• Google PageSpeed Insights
• KeyCDN
• Pingdom
• WebPage Test
• Web Page Analyzer

How to Increase Mobile Site Speed

If you’re wondering how to increase mobile page speed, know that you need to implement different measures. If you feel any of these are beyond your technical knowledge, it is best to seek assistance from a reputable web design company.

1. Check and Reduce Server Response Time

While the coding involved in your website development plays an important role in its loading time, the server you use to host it also plays a crucial role. For instance, if your server takes a long time to respond to browser requests, the resultant load time of your website will be slow. Typically, servers start transmitting information within 200 milliseconds of a request.

You may improve your server response time by implementing these measures.

• Minimize page resources.
• Improve your web server’s configuration or consider using different web server software.
• Make sure your website has enough memory and CPU resources.

Looking for the most affordable hosting option might work well initially. However, as your website starts getting increased traffic, you need to think about upgrading. When you move beyond basic hosting packages, your options include:

• Shared hosting. You share all resources with other websites, and traffic spikes to other sites might have an adverse effect on your site’s loading time.
• VPS hosting. You get a dedicated portion of a server’s resources.
• Dedicated server. You get a dedicated server as well as control over the server’s configuration.

2. Remove Ads

Consider removing on-page ads as they make your website reliant on third-party servers, which can have a negative effect on loading time. Besides, according to Backlinko, 33% of Americans make use of ad-blocking technology. You may consider using other monetization methods that do not affect how quickly your site loads. These may come in the form of remarketing and social media ads.

3. Reconsider Using Pop-Ups and Unnecessary Plugins

According to Google, using pop-ups with mobile websites is alright in some instances. A problem may arise if you build your website using WordPress or a different content management system (CMS) and rely on plugins to create pop-ups. This is because pop-ups would end up slowing down the loading time of your website by generating additional HTTP requests. In addition, avoid the use of unnecessary plugins because plugins can affect mobile website speed adversely.

4. Provide a Quick First Impression

Your website needs to display content in some form as quickly as possible, failing which you may expect a high bounce rate. Google suggests following these steps to ensure that your website starts loading quickly.

• Get above-the-fold content to load before below-the-fold content. Above-the-fold content refers to content that a user can see before starting to scroll down. Delivering this content within one second is ideal, and the time it takes for the page’s interactive elements to load should limit to below five seconds. Achieving this requires coding your website in a manner that the server transmits the data required to display the above-the-fold content first. Then, a user gets to view the content as ready even as the rest of the page continues to load.
• Place CSS at the top and JS at the bottom of HTML files. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) detail how your website displays different HTML elements. By adding style sheets at your programming document’s beginning, your site appears to load faster. This is because adding CSS at the beginning enables a browser to display any available content almost immediately. While JavaScript (JS) adds interactive elements to your site, its scripts prevent simultaneous downloads. As a result, moving JS scripts to the bottom of a page when possible can help improve mobile site speed from the point of view of a user. This is because some elements of your website start loading much sooner.

5. Make Your Website Lighter

Websites and web pages have become considerably heavier over the last few years owing to the addition of elements such as HD images, videos, custom fonts, style sheets, JS files, and more. The average web page size has continued to increase, and data collated by Pingdom put this number at 2,484 KB in 2024.

However, the premise that the lighter a webpage is the quicker it will load still holds true. If you plan to build a new website and focus on mobile page speed optimization or tweak your existing one to make it faster, keeping it light is the best way forward.

• Compress images. While images often take time to load, optimizing them for speed is rather easy. First, go through your website carefully and do away with all unnecessary images. The next step is to reduce the size of the images still present without affecting their quality much. If you’ve used WordPress to create your website, you may use image optimization plugins such as Optimole, Imagify, WP Smush, or Compress JPEG & PNG Images (by TinyPNG). For websites created using other platforms, your top options include Adobe Photoshop, GIMP, TinyPNG, JPEGmini, and ImageOptim (for Mac). Consider using SVG files for images that don’t have too much detailing as they are noticeably lighter than their JPEG and PNG counterparts.
• Compress other resources. One way in which web development companies work on mobile web performance optimization is by compressing web pages. They essentially need to add some lines of code and follow a few other measures. You can also use popular mobile web tools such as Gzip, Deflate, Brotli, bzip2, Zstandard, or XZ to reduce the size of your website’s pages.
• Minimize resources. Each JS, CSS, and HTML file linked to your website contributes to the number of HTML requests required to load its pages. In some cases, you might be able to remove unnecessary elements such as white space, comments, block delimiters, size-heavy fonts, and files that play no role in the code’s execution. While you can minify your website’s code manually, the task can be challenging if you do not have the required coding experience. Fortunately, you may use online tools such as Closure Compiler, UglifyJS2, Minify Code, and YOI Compressor to minify your website’s code in a quick and easy manner. Combining files of the same formats can decrease the number of HTTP requests required to load a page, and it can also trim down the website’s total size.

6. Think Optimization

If you wish to optimize web speed for mobile devices, you need to think about optimizing just about every element of your website.

• Images. In addition to compressing images, consider replacing animated GIFs with videos. Use the right dimensions to provide responsive images. Make use of Content Delivery Network (CDN) and WebP images when possible.
• Fonts. Use one or two simple and light fonts. Refrain from using invisible text when the font is loading. While minimizing the number of fonts makes for consistency in your website’s design, it also reduces the number of HTTP requests required for your site to load.
• JavaScript. Use code that is compatible with modern web browsers. Removing code that plays no significant role and applying instant loading helps. Consider compressing network payloads as well.
• CSS. You need to minify and extract critical CSS while deferring non-critical CSS. Optimizing background images through media queries can also help.
• Lazy loading. Lazy loading ensures that elements of a page load only when a user scrolls to the section in question. This way, the entire page does not have to load at the same time.

7. Steer Clear of Page Redirects

When your website has a redirect, it involves an added HTTP request-response cycle, which leads to a delay in the loading of a page. Unfortunately, the process repeats for every file that is part of the page, and can, at times, be rather time-consuming. Consider these examples:

• Abc.com makes use of a completely responsive design and provides a quick and optimized experience.
• Abc.com redirects to m.abc.com, which involves a redirect, and slows down user experience.
• Abc.net redirects to abc.com which further redirects to m.abc.com, which makes for a very slow user experience.

Different online tools give webmasters easy means to detect redirects. Some of the popular ones include Redirect Detective, Redirect Path, Redirect Mapper, and NoRedirect.

8. Reduce Steps

Consider this – would you go through six steps to complete a process when you can do it in three instead? From your customers’ point of view, the lesser they have to do to accomplish a task, the better. Reducing steps helps shorten the sales funnel, and it also provides a better user experience. If you take a look at popular eCommerce websites, you will notice that several follow this mantra.

Eliminating steps also helps minimize coding, because the fewer pages your website has, the lesser it requires in terms of coding. If you’re thinking about mobile speed optimization, paying attention to this aspect is very important.

Conclusion

If you’re wondering how to build a mobile-optimized website or how to improve mobile site speed, remember that the time it takes to load is crucial. This is because delivering a great user experience requires that your website should load in less than five seconds. Reducing processing load on mobile devices by minifying coding and optimizing various elements such as HTML, CSS, and images can have the desired effect.

Removing unnecessary design elements, especially the heavier ones, can have a noticeable effect on loading speed, as can simplifying web design, and making sure your website does not suffer because of server issues. Speeding up your website will not just provide a better user experience, but will bode well with search engine rankings as well.

If you use the right techniques, you can get on the path to mobile site speed optimization. In case you feel you don’t have the required know-how, consider seeking assistance from a reputed web design agency.