8 Quick Tips to Optimize Your Mobile Site's Load Time Right Now

According to The Offbeat Story, mobile shopping now accounts for 50.3% of all ecommerce traffic.

No wonder, most businesses keep optimizing the content, design, functionality and other aspects of their mobile sites' to improve their conversion rates.

But sadly, just 22% businesses are satisfied with their conversion rates. Why? Because they don't really care about optimizing their mobile site's load time!

In fact, many businesses let it pass to ensure new web design, fancy user interface or to publish content after content at the site.

Is Mobile Site's Page Load Time Actually Important?

The answer is a resounding YES! In fact, 47% users want sites to load within 3 seconds or less and approximately 40% visitors' bounce off a site if it doesn't load within 3 seconds.

It gets worse - a 1 second delay in your site's load time decreases conversions by 7%; page views by 11%; and customer satisfaction rate by 16%.

This means your users' now care more about your mobile site's speed than all the bells & whistles, and you need to be proactive with your mobile site's speed optimization. Don't worry; it isn't as complex as it sounds.

Just spare a few minutes of your day and tackle one of these 8 quick tips now to quickly optimize your site's speed, without having to burn midnight oil.

1. Optimize Browser Caching– You probably already know that mobile browsers aren't really capable of caching too much content as against desktop browsers. So, it makes sense to ensure that your mobile browser uses local memory for caching content.

This will help you eliminate the chances of unasked for HTTP requests and decrease your mobile site's loading time by a few seconds.

2. Take Care of Render Blocking Resources – Render blocking resources such as HTML, CSS, and Javascript can block the DOM (Document Object Model); thereby causing unnecessary page load delays.

You must make use of media queries to mark some CSS files as non-render blocking. Use async or defer directive to steer clear of render blocking. In addition, concatenate your CSS and JAVA files into one file to optimize your critical rendering path.

3. Reduce Latency with an Effective CDN (Content Delivery Network) – It is advisable to use an effective CDN. It helps distribute pages and content quickly to users across a broad geographical location; thereby reducing your overall TTFB, decreasing your latency and speeding up your mobile site. No wonder, 45% of top 2,000 American ecommerce sites use an effective CDN.

4. Minify CSS and Javascript – Minifying your CSS and Javascript resources could be another major move towards optimizing your mobile site for optimum load time.

Remove all unnecessary characters including white spaces, new lines, comments and block delimiters to reduce the amount of code to be requested from the server and speed up your mobile site.

5. Avoid Redirects – Redirects add an unconditional lag to your site's speed and it makes sense to avoid using them. It instigates an additional round trip time (RTT) and increases the time to load the initial HTML document.

6. Trim JavaScript Parsing– Javascript parsing is another performance killer. It increases the load time by increasing the amount of codes requested from servers.

Avoid unnecessary Javascript parsing to decrease your mobile site's load time.

7. Optimize Images– It is sensible to optimize the images on your mobile site to ensure that your site loads faster. Lightweight and simple images tend to reduce sites' load times as they require lesser bandwidth to get processed.

8. Use Touch Events – A lot of visitors abandon a mobile site because of the load time delay after clicking on a button. Typically, ecommerce sites feature click event delays of 1-7 seconds. To avoid this delay, you can use touch events instead of the traditional click events.

Over to You!

Remember, load time of your mobile site can spell the difference between success and failure for your business. So use these 10 easy tips to shave those few, extra seconds off your mobile site's load time, without having to run from pillar to post.