6 Proven Techniques on How to Increase Mobile Page Speed in 2024

Let’s face it, in today’s fast-paced digital world, everyone wants information quickly. This is especially true on mobile devices, where people are often on the go. 

But what happens when your website takes forever to load? You might have fantastic content and a beautiful design, but if your mobile page speed is slow, people won’t stick around to see it.

Studies show that just a fraction of a second can have a significant impact. For example, a tiny 0.1-second improvement in mobile page speed can make a difference in customer behavior.

Think about it, have you ever gotten frustrated and left a website because it was loading too slowly? Most people have. In fact, a whopping 79% of users admit they wouldn’t go back to a site if they had a bad experience because of slow load times.

If you’re concerned about mobile page speed and want to ensure your site offers the best possible experience, Texas Web Design can help. We specialize in optimizing websites for speed and performance. 

Call us today to learn how we can help keep your visitors happy and engaged.

Why Mobile Page Speed Matters

It’s not just about making visitors happy; it’s also about your bottom line. A speedy mobile site can lead to higher search engine rankings, an improved user experience, and increased conversion rates. Let’s break it down further.

Impact on SEO

Google is the biggest search engine in the world, and they want their users to have the best possible experience. That’s why Google considers mobile page speed a key factor in how it ranks websites.

When a site loads fast on a mobile device, Google sees it as a positive sign. It means you’ve considered the needs of mobile users. But if a site is sluggish, Google might decide to push it down in the search results.

After all, who wants to wait ages for a website to load when there are tons of others out there? In short, a fast mobile site speed directly correlates to SEO.

The faster your pages load, the more likely they’ll get a boost in rankings.

User Experience

Imagine waiting for a webpage to load. Ten seconds go by, then twenty. You’re starting to get impatient, aren’t you? It’s no surprise, then, that a slow website can lead to a bad user experience.

This can translate into a higher bounce rate, which is the percentage of visitors who leave your website after viewing only one page. They land on your site, get annoyed by the slow load time, and bounce.

On the flip side, a fast website keeps visitors engaged. It allows them to find the information they’re looking for without frustration, increasing their chances of exploring other areas of your website.

 Conversion Rates

Faster websites not only keep visitors happy but also make them more likely to take action. Even a one-second delay in page load times can cause conversion rates to drop by 20%.

If your visitors get stuck staring at a loading screen while trying to buy something or sign up for your email list, they might abandon their carts. After all, in a world of instant gratification, no one wants to wait.

If your goal is to make sales, generate leads, or even just have visitors spend more time on your website, you can’t underestimate the importance of mobile page speed.

How to Check Your Mobile Page Speed

Thankfully, you don’t need to guess whether your site’s mobile page speed is up to par. There are tools you can use to analyze the situation. They’ll provide an objective assessment of your mobile website’s performance and give you tips on improvements.

Google PageSpeed Insights

Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool analyzes your website’s content, looking at aspects like image sizes and how your code is structured. Then it tells you what areas need to be improved.

The best part is that it gives specific and actionable recommendations specific to your site. This is a huge advantage over general suggestions.

GTmetrix

GTmetrix not only measures your website’s loading time from different geographical locations (remember, how quickly a website loads for someone in Paris might be different than how quickly it loads for someone in Sydney) but it goes a step further and provides comprehensive analysis.

It breaks down how different elements on your webpage are performing, providing recommendations on image optimization, caching methods, and minimizing code.

Key Strategies on How to Increase Mobile Page Speed

Here are some concrete steps you can take to get your website up to speed. By implementing them, you’ll keep your visitors engaged and improve their overall experience, resulting in higher conversion rates, more returning visitors, and greater profitability.

1. Choose a Lightweight and Fast Web Hosting Plan

Just like a car engine affects a car’s performance, your web hosting directly influences your website’s loading speed. 

Shared hosting, often the cheapest option, involves sharing server resources with many other websites.  While this is economical, it also means your website could be affected by the traffic on other websites, resulting in slower loading speeds.

On the other hand, a managed WordPress hosting plan provides a dedicated server and offers specialized speed optimizations, making a world of difference, particularly when traffic starts pouring in.

For example, when comparing the latest version of PHP (7.4) to older ones, like version 5.6, we can see how the newer PHP handles 3x more requests per second, meaning faster loading times and improved overall performance.

While you don’t have to manage servers directly on a managed plan, a good provider should offer things like server-level caching to handle heavy traffic loads. They’re often equipped with Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), ensuring your content is delivered efficiently from different geographical locations to visitors around the globe.

This way, someone in Australia accessing your US-based website wouldn’t experience lagging. The extra cost can often pay for itself, because slow sites make fewer sales, conversions, and less money.

2. Optimize Images: Lean and Mean

Images add a lot of visual appeal to a website; however, they’re often the culprits for sluggish mobile pages. By optimizing your images, you’re telling search engines and visitors alike, “Hey, I care about providing a great user experience.”

Just like a backpack, you wouldn’t want to stuff it full of heavy rocks when trying to run a race. That’s precisely what unoptimized images do; they bog down your site, slowing its performance.

Think about HTTP requests, which are how your website’s server communicates with your visitor’s browser. The more images you have, the more of those requests need to happen.

And with the rise of mobile as a preferred platform—it makes up more than half of all internet usage globally—how to increase mobile website speed has become even more relevant than desktop.

Shrinking those rocks, making them lighter without sacrificing their purpose – that’s essentially what image optimization does.

There are several techniques: image resizing and compression (making images smaller without noticeable quality loss), lazy loading (loading images only as a visitor scrolls down), and using WebP formats, which result in smaller image sizes and faster load times compared to traditional formats.

It’s about making every byte count, giving your site an extra edge on those race tracks.

Google states that using WOFF2 (Web Open Font Format) for fonts is another excellent method to significantly decrease file sizes (up to 30%.) and contribute to how to increase mobile page speed. Even the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommends this, acknowledging how it directly influences a better mobile experience.

3. The Magic of Caching

You already have caching at your fingertips; every web browser utilizes it. When you visit a website again, your browser often remembers things, like images or logos, making it load faster. Now imagine that same thing, happening on a grander scale. Website caching does just that.

Server-side caching generates static HTML versions of your dynamic pages, simplifying the way information is sent to a user’s device, removing the need for the server to rebuild the same page every time someone accesses it. Client-side caching involves using a browser’s local memory to store pieces of websites you visit regularly.

A website caching plugin or service essentially creates copies of your website content and keeps them ready to be delivered whenever someone requests your pages. Since these are already pre-built and ready-to-go copies, they can be delivered blazingly fast.

4. Use a CDN to Supercharge Your Reach

Using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) is an excellent example of how to increase mobile page speed by bringing your website closer to your users.

A CDN stores copies of your website data across numerous servers all over the world. This way, when someone accesses your website, they get that information from the closest server geographically, eliminating any lag or slow-downs.

5. Keep Your Code Clean and Compact

Imagine reading a sentence full of unnecessary words and confusing grammatical errors. It would be difficult to understand. Unclean code can have a similar impact on your website.

Developers sometimes use extra characters or lines of code (comments) to understand what they are working on. While those notes make things easier for humans, they don’t do much for a website’s loading time.

So minimizing and compressing HTML, CSS, and Javascript, the building blocks of a website’s visual and interactive features, is a simple yet impactful method.

Another method is Gzip compression, which shrinks files down. A small act that speeds up their transfer, leading to a faster experience for visitors.

Even a fraction of a second matters; if your website takes an extra 3 seconds to load, more than half of all visits might be lost. And it’s not just Google.

6. Prioritize the Essentials: Above the Fold

Above-the-fold content is everything a visitor sees immediately when landing on your webpage, before scrolling. The faster it appears, the less frustrated a visitor will be. But some hidden code (like render-blocking resources) can significantly slow the loading time of a mobile site.

Prioritizing essential elements on your page, including loading critical Javascript and CSS content first, makes all the difference in how a user experiences it. Another important aspect of prioritizing is implementing lazy loading, a method of deferring non-critical scripts.

Only elements the visitor will interact with should be delivered first, loading the less important parts later. Just make sure things load smoothly before the visitor gets to them.

Mobile is the Future— Speed Up Today

It’s clear that today, understanding how to increase mobile page speed is more relevant than ever.

Even back in 2018, Google introduced mobile speed scores, clearly highlighting that fast load times were going to become the future, affecting websites that ignore these principles.

While desktop usage continues to shrink—making up a bit more than 45% of all website traffic—people aren’t going to stop accessing websites from their computers.

The goal here isn’t to create perfect websites; after all, the average mobile site takes a whopping 22 seconds to fully load.

However, being conscious of best practices when building websites and paying attention to user experience is what separates websites that people come back to from those they never visit again.

We also have to keep in mind that as newer and more sophisticated PHP versions are rolled out (PHP 7.3 already allows websites to operate up to 4x faster), choosing fast servers will play an increasingly important role, in addition to minimizing HTTP requests.

This is further confirmed by data released about MySQL, which is essentially a “brain” that helps a server deliver information fast; when using a new, tuned MySQL version, a server can be 2x faster than older versions.

This translates into an excellent strategy of how to increase mobile page speed on any site and cater to modern audiences with shorter attention spans.

Boost Your Mobile Page Speed and Keep Visitors Engaged

In a world increasingly driven by mobile experiences, neglecting speed can make you irrelevant to your potential clients and customers. A one-second delay in loading times could result in 11% fewer page views and a 7% loss in conversion.

Understanding how to increase mobile page speed involves paying close attention to aspects like choosing the best web hosting, improving total blocking time, streamlining website code, and utilizing caching mechanisms.

You also have to take things like AMP technology—which has become a popular framework for speeding up sites since it appeared in Google results in early 2016—into consideration. But most of all, it’s about keeping your visitors engaged and excited, giving them a smooth experience when accessing your content.

For expert help with mobile optimization and fast landing page design, contact Texas Web Design. Let us enhance your landing page for better user experience and conversions.