5 Ways to Design Your Website for Mobile Speed

The loading time of a website greatly affects user behaviour. Depending on how fast your website loads, it could either boost your conversions or make the target audience leave. According to a research done by Google in 2017, nearly 53% users leave a website if it does not load within 3 seconds. Additionally, nearly 79% of the shoppers don’t return to a site if it’s slow. This clearly makes website speed optimization a crucial part of your digital marketing strategy. Not just desktops and Macs, your website needs to be optimized for mobile phones as well because mobile users account for nearly 48% of web page views worldwide. In this blog, we will share 5 ways you can design your own website for better mobile speed.

1. Switch to Better Hosting – If the visitor count on your mobile website is much larger, it might be time for you to switch to better hosting, ideally a dedicated server. With a basic hosting plan (that you probably bought because you had a smaller website), you might be limiting yourself on better maintenance features, latest PHP and MySQL versions, email services, etc. Upgrading to a dedicated server can help you improve your mobile website speed performance.

2. Remove Unnecessary Plugins – Often, to make our website more visually appealing or add more functionality to it, we overload it with too many plugins. These unnecessary plugins, though they are quick and easy to install, increase the loading time of your website. Some of them just duplicate the function of others. Find and remove these plugins! Also, try to get rid of outdated and unsupported plugins that are slowing down your site on mobile.

3. Minify JavaScript and CSS Files – In a research done by SEMrush in 2018, it was found that nearly 68% of the websites they tested had not minified JavaScript and CSS files. Minifying JavaScript is a crucial step to get rid of unnecessary lines, comments, and whitespaces from the source code that are making your mobile website heavy and slow to load. Using various tools, such as JSMin, CSS Closure Compiler, etc. you can dispose of these dead code and rewrite what’s left.

For even better results, you can go for obfuscation. It allows you to create a source or machine code that is clear to the machine only. As a result, you are able to reduce the size of the code and download time of JavaScript and webpage. Obfuscation can be risky due to generated bugs. If you want to use this method, make sure you consult a professional. Consider hiring an experienced web design team in India.

4. Enable Caching for Mobile Browsers – In addition to minifying JavaScript, it’s important for you to enable caching for mobile browsers. This ensures that the page information is stored by the browser for future and not downloaded every time a user visits your website using a mobile device. This ultimately reduces the loading time of your mobile website.

5. Optimize Images – We all know how important images are for a website, however, images that are large in size or those uploaded in the wrong format can make your website really slow, especially when browsed from a mobile device. Try to optimize these images as much as possible without compromising on their quality. Various tools that you can use for image compression include TinyPNG, Github, etc.

There are several other ways you can optimize your website for mobile speed, such as:

1. Using the Lazy Loading Effect
2. Reducing the number of redirects to your website
3. Fixing slow application logic, routing, database queries resource, CPU starvation, etc.

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