Slow-Loading Mobile Site? Here's How to Turbocharge its Speed
(cover image: looks like a construction site, a locked fence with a yellow sign on the left side of the locked gate spelled S L O W)
Slow-Loading Mobile Site? Here's How to Turbocharge its Speed
Every second counts in today's fast-paced mobile browsing world, and patience wears thin for everyone when a slow-loading mobile site hits. Consider this scenario: you're on the go, trying to access a website on your smartphone or tablet, and it takes a long time to load. You will see a white screen. You become frustrated, then look somewhere else.
See photo
Photo: this white screen is commonly seen WA slow loading today on my iPhone.
We've all been there, including myself. The slow loading of mobile sites is a significant frustration to fix. This post will show you some of the problems with a slow-loading mobile site, what causes them, and tips on how to solve them to optimize your website's mobile speed.
What is a Slow-Loading Mobile Site?
A slow-loading mobile site can significantly frustrate users and negatively affect your business. Simply put, it refers to a website that takes excessive time to load on mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets.
Usually, slow-loading mobile sites are caused by large amounts of data, heavy image files, and complex coding. Several factors can affect a website's speed, but one of the most common is that it needs to be optimized for mobile devices.
It may not be possible for the code on your site to load quickly on smaller screens or slower connections. Specific plugins and scripts can also slow the loading process.
The Key Takeaway: We all need to be reminded that people today typically browse their phones, often looking for quick access to information, so every second counts regarding your website's mobile loading speed.
Do you know what tools are available?
To determine if your mobile site is suffering from slow-loading issues, you can utilize various online tools designed explicitly for this purpose. These tools will analyze your site's performance and provide valuable insights into areas needing improvement.
Online tools available are:
- Google PageSpeed Insights
- GTmetrix
- WebPageTest
- Pingdom Website Speed Test
- Dareboost Speed Test
Please take a look at some identified problem areas; there are several steps you can take to optimize your mobile site's speed.
This includes:
Compressing images without sacrificing quality by looking at the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
- Accessibility for screen readers (low vision readers).
- Use enabling browser caching.
- Minifying HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
- Optimizing the server response time will help improve the slow-loading mobile site.
To minimize loading times on mobile devices, you must take the necessary steps to optimize your website’s performance. The faster load times improve mobile user satisfaction.
Causes of Slow-Loading Mobile Site
Slow-loading mobile sites can be a real nuisance and frustration to users. It can lead to decreased engagement, customer dissatisfaction, and ultimately lost revenue.
There are numerous factors and causes of a slow-loading mobile site.
1. Large Image Files: The largest contentful paint (LCP) and large image files can significantly delay page loading.
Photo: My PPC site, that photo has the largest contentful paint elements blurred out my site because I am still working on it.
Fixed the image, and it shows this speed now
Photo: My PPC site. Before, it was terrible, but I worked on compressing my images and trying to reduce the LCP. I am still working on my PPC site. I already showed that in my previous post. Please feel free to check it out.
https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/brendamz/blog/follow-5-proven-steps-for-writing-an-effective-call-to...
2. Uncompressed Images and Videos: Without compression, images, and videos can take up more bandwidth, resulting in slower page loading.
3. Too Many Redirects: When a mobile website contains several redirects, it can take longer for the page to load.
4. Poorly Designed Website: Inefficient or poorly written code can cause your website's pages to load slowly.
5. Third-Party Widgets and Ads: Adding widgets and ads from third parties can significantly slow down a web page since they require additional requests from external servers.
6. Poorly Coded HTML: If the code is optimized for mobile devices, poorly coded HTML and JavaScript can prevent mobile sites from loading slowly.
7. Uncompressed CSS & JavaScript Files: Uncompressed CSS & JavaScript files can significantly increase page load time, especially on mobile devices with slower internet speeds.
8. Not Optimizing for Mobile: A website not optimized for mobile devices may result in a slow-loading experience due to different browsers, screen sizes, and connection speeds.
9.. Third-Party Content: The performance of your site on mobile devices can be significantly slowed down by third-party content, such as videos, ads, analytics tracking code, etc.
When you address these common causes of slow-loading mobile sites, you'll be well on your way to turbocharging their speed and improving the user experience.
Tips on How to Test and Fix Your Mobile Site Speed.
Is your mobile site taking forever to load? Slow-loading mobile sites can be frustrating for users and detrimental to your website's performance. I learned the hard way. I figured out how to test and fix it, so I am here to show you the steps you can take to improve your mobile site's speed issues.
Step 1: Test the Current Speed of Your Mobile Site: To fix your mobile site's speed, it is necessary to understand how it performs currently. An online tool like Google PageSpeed Insights helps you do this. In addition to providing you with a score of 100, this tool also offers recommendations on improving your website.
Step 2: Optimize Your Image Files: Using tools such as Imagify, TinyPNG, and Smush can help you reduce the file size without sacrificing the quality of your images. You can ensure all images are compressed and saved at the correct size for your mobile site.
Step 3: Minimize HTTP Requests & Enable Caching: Reducing HTTP requests can improve page loading times, especially on mobile devices with limited bandwidth. To minimize HTTP requests, combine files into one file and eliminate unnecessary plugins and scripts.
Step 4: Reduce Server Response Time: Server response time. You can use several online tools to measure the loading time of your mobile site on various devices and connections. These tools will help you determine what is causing the slow loading of your site.
Step 5: Optimizing the code on your website is also essential. This means removing unnecessary or outdated code that could slow down your site. In addition, you can minify the code and make sure everything is neatly organized and up-to-date.
Step 6. Reduce Redirects: Every redirect adds extra time to the page load process. Minimize redirect chains and eliminate unnecessary redirects whenever possible.
Step 7: Implement Lazy Loading: The visible portion of a webpage loads first, and other elements are loaded as the user scrolls down the page. This technique is especially effective on image-heavy websites, saving bandwidth and improving speed.
I worked hard on these seven steps to improve my PPC site mobile speed and MMO niche mobile website speed.
Photo: My other MMO site as of yesterday, fixing all my problems with slow mobile speed. I removed a lot of heavy Java script-loading plugins. Now it's much better.
You can monitor and test your pages' performance regularly to stay ahead of problems in the future. If you keep track of metrics like page weight, server response time, and overall load time, you can make further improvements if needed. You should regularly test your mobile site's performance using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix to identify areas for improvement.
Final Thoughts
A slow-loading mobile site is certainly not the best experience for users. It leads to frustrated customers, high bounce rates, and potential loss of revenue. To ensure your mobile site is running at optimum speed, it is essential to identify why loading times are sluggish and take proactive steps to address the issue. Optimizing your system could make all the difference in keeping customers engaged and increasing conversions.
PS: Click like, comment, and share whatever is on your mind about the topic.
Recent Comments
57
What a great and thoughtful post. This information is worth its weight in gold, hits and sales for online marketers. You take so much time and energy to educate us on topics, we may not have even thought needed exploring. I very much appreciate this information. Great work, you deserve a gold star.
There is nothing worse than a slow loading mobile screen when we are on the run and searching for info Brenda (except for the dreaded white screen of death that is)!
I tend to just keep things as simple as possible on my sites and the speeds are usually ok...
But... to improve them I will certainly take on board some of the tips, advice and resources you have shared here!
Much appreciated as always my friend and enjoy the rest of your week l! :-)
great information Brenda!
So far, I have tried everything to speed things up on mobile. Although it isn't severely bad , it is a bit on the lower side (in the end of 70%), but I think it is mainly because of using ads from Monumetrics.
But I don't want to lose my ads income either, as it is actually my largest source of income at the moment, so I can't change that.
I had to use WP Rocket, because otherwise my speed was in the red and it showed on my traffic.
Doing all of the other things, switching my theme to Generate Press, only use the plugins that I needed, using CDN etc etc, didn't do anything.
I do also have a very image-heavy and video-heavy niche though, there's no working around that, both of niches are very visual, people need to see images and vids.
( I do think that I need to split some articles into more separate articles, as to make those less video heavy, will need to look into that)
The thing is also that the biggest issue I have when looking at speed insights is this IPN thing, and when I contact WP Rocket, they say that they are studying it as we speak, because Google will have it next year as a core web vital.
Then there is the design and coding that I have been told to improve, as you said, but I probably need to pay someone to look into that, because that is Chinese for me lol!
The redirect thing: does this include redirects for articles that were deleted to another article? Because when deleting articles, one really needs to redirect those to avoid 404 errors, which Google doesn't like either!
thanks for this article!
Lizzy
See more comments
Can I ask if you will ever have ads on your website Brenda? Because I have and I have found a solution for my slow speed, without doing any of these things that you talk about here (and all the time and energy wasted sorry). Lots of people want to monetize their sites with ads and that shouldn't be a problem.
But if I say how here, I might get banned LOL!
The vitality part I still need to fix, but I think it has something to do with a code for a scale convertor that I had made by someone on Fivver. But thats not urgent I think.
Before, it was somewhere in the 70's, even on desktop.
correction: accessibility is the translation I think, not vitality
This is an excellent point, Brenda.
After much experimenting, I chose blues for my websites.
It works well.
Currently, I am increasing the font size on my websites.
I am noticing an increase in my loading speeds as a result.
I am learning a lot from this conversation.
Thank you!
Cassi
That is great, Brenda.
I have been wearing corrective lenses since I was 4 years old.
My eyesight is bad.
I empathize.
In school, I befriended a classmate who was blind.
She started to teach me how to read using Braille but I was never consistent.
I wish I had.
She went on to University and is now one of our country's top Attorneys. 🙂
There are no limits.
Have a good weekend.
Cassi
hello Brenda
Yes, I briefly checked it, not in-depth yet and there were a few issues with the contrast indeed of the review plugin that I deactivated and the scale convertor on my site, as I thought so. (other things I normally get a warning from WordPress itself I noticed, for headings and such) I will look closer into this in time, and I will contact you if I can't understand, thanks!
Lizzy
Thank you, Brenda.
missed that one, thanks Brenda !