When you want to access a website on your mobile device, how long do you wait for it to load? Before you spam the return button? On average, this wait time comes to about 2 seconds. If your website takes any longer than that to begin to load, your website visitors, and potential customers, will leave. So, if you want your website to be successful, you need to take steps to reduce the load speed for your mobile website. But how? Well, here at Pumpkin Web Design Manchester, we are Manchester’s leading web design professionals. And we build responsive websites for companies and clients across Manchester and the North West. As a result, we have produced this guide to reducing load speed and mobile web design.
Google’s speed update
On the 17th January 2018, Google announced that the ranking algorithm for mobile websites would be updated, to also include the loading speed of the website. And as of July 2018, this change came into effect. This means that websites that take longer to load than their competitors, may now find themselves losing out on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) and ranking lower than they would have prior to the update. This can have a subsequent impact on traffic, and sales. And could lead to big losses. So how exactly can you speed your website up?
Reducing load speed and mobile web design
There are a range of options that you can consider to make your mobile website run faster. These include:
- optimizing images
- enabling compression
- optimizing css
- prioritizing code
Optimizing images
When it comes to reducing load speed and mobile web design, optimizing your images is one of the easiest steps you can take. Simply resizing your images manually, instead of with CSS can make a huge difference to the load time of your website. This is because, a full size image will be loaded first, before being resized by the CSS. And although your website visitors wont see this occur, as it happens “behind the scenes”, they will notice that they are waiting for your images to appear.
Enabling compression
If you are worried about loss of quality with your images, why not compress them instead? This can reduce the file size by up to 75%, without a loss in quality. So your website will still look professional, but it won’t take as long to load.
In addition, you can compress your entire website too. This can again reduce the overall file size of your website by 75%. And this means that your website will load almost instantly. However, this is handled on the server side, and so it will depend on your server host as to what they can offer you.
Prioritize carefully
Although Javascript files can be loaded after your website, most designers still use the JS script at the front of the content. And this means that before your website can load, the JS files have to be in place first. As a result, your potential customers are left waiting for your website to load, needlessly. Instead, you should prioritize your JS to load after the rest of the website. This can really shave off the seconds and make a big difference to the load time for your mobile website. You can also use “defer” and “async” options to reduce load time.
For more information about reducing load speed and mobile web design, get in touch with the experts today, here at Pumpkin Web Design Manchester.