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Too often, site owners and their teams are fully immersed in their websites, only to miss one crucial question:
“How do site visitors experience my website on mobile?”
With Google’s introduction of its three Core Web Vitals (CWVs) in 2020—Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID)*, and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)—failing to optimize your website for mobile access can quickly result in disastrous rankings that lead to poor visibility and can hamper lead generation and conversion rates.
*As of March 12, 2024, Interaction to Next Paint (INP) has officially replaced First Input Delay. Chrome is officially deprecating support for FID, so developers and site owners have until September 9, 2024, to transition over to INP.
These three metrics are the standard for excellent user experience and must be kept at the forefront of your mind when it comes to developing and maintaining your website.
And, considering that mobiles currently account for around half of all website traffic globally, making sure that your website loads rapidly and correctly on those traffic-heavy devices should be a no-brainer.
One thing to keep in mind, however, is that CWVs come in handy only when a site's competitors all have the same quality of content; it’s at that point that metrics such as loading speed become the deciding factor.
Image sourced from statista.com
This guide will explore 12 ways to speed up your website performance on mobile and explain exactly why this is crucial.
As seen above, mobile traffic accounts for more than half of total online traffic, and page speed is part of the metrics that Google uses to evaluate website quality.
If we combine these two factors, we get a simple picture:
Ensuring your website loads quickly on mobile devices will help your SERP rankings, visibility, and potentially even your lead generation and conversions.
The importance of rapid website performance is highlighted in the following research and statistics:
Bear in mind that there are lots of ways to optimize your site. For instance, you can search for the perfect, on-brand domain name using domain name search and keep up with changing search engine optimization (SEO) best practices.
That said, as we mentioned, CWVs become the deciding factor when content quality is the same across websites.
It’s also good to know that better Core Web Vitals have been linked to improved search engine advertising (SEA) results. In fact, one of Lever Interactive's clients increased their Quality Score, leading to -17% CPC and -31% CPA, which also meant a 20% increase in conversion rates on faster landing pages.
Moreover, Netzwelt saw advertising revenues increase by 18%, ad visibility increase by over 75%, bounce rates decrease by 50%, and page views increased by 27% by optimizing for Core Web Vitals.
All things considered, it’s pretty clear how important it is to have a fast website performance for mobiles. But what are the types of things that are slowing your website down? The following can be at fault:
If any of the above rings true for you, then this guide is exactly what you need.
Given what you know now, you’re probably wondering what the best ways are to speed up mobile website performance and whether you’ll need to be a mobile developer to achieve it.
But before we dive into our ultimate guide of tips, it’s wise to discuss how fast your mobile website should be and how you can measure your site’s performance and speed.
In other words, how do you know what to aim for?
According to Scaleflex, the “unified benchmark since 2015” has been that a webpage should take 2 seconds to load. But with an average load time for mobile sites of 8.6 seconds, it’s clear that there’s a lot of work to do.
Thankfully, tools are available to audit your mobile site and determine what needs improvement.
PageSpeed Insights (PSI) is a site performance testing tool that analyzes load time, responsiveness, and visual stability for a specific webpage on mobile and desktop.
You should pay particular attention to Core Web Vitals, as these field data-based metrics measure how real users experience your website rather than hypothetical users.
The following three Core Web Vitals are the essential metrics to analyze, as they will tell you a lot about your mobile performance:
DevTools are built directly into Google Chrome and are great for debugging and optimizing your website. When it comes to mobile performance, these key features are particularly useful:
Image sourced from developer.chrome.com
Even after optimizing your mobile website, you will still need to continuously test and monitor your mobile page according to different metrics.
Do remember that, ultimately, mobiles will never load a website as fast as a desktop. For this reason, mobile results are always lower than desktop ones. However, don’t let this put you off; you’re not competing against desktops—you’re competing against other mobile webpages.
That is why it is so important for site owners to focus on optimizing their website within the context of CWVs as a key standard.
And this is how you can do it…
Unoptimized images and fonts are heavy and will cause your website to lag.
LCP is a key Core Web Vital metric used to measure perceived load speed.
70% of mobile pages have an image as an LCP element. According to Google PSI, there are some image and text-related recommendations to take into account when looking to speed up mobile site performance.
Other image and font optimization recommendations include using next-gen image formats rather than older ones, such as JPEG or PNG. Next-gen image formats like WebP offer superior compression—a higher image quality with less data.
For those of you hosting ecommerce sites, you can hardly reduce the number of images on your site: they’re your main marketing tool for attracting consumers.
If that’s the case, you’ll need to pay extra attention when optimizing e-commerce images, such as ensuring the correct image format.
You can also use different images for desktop, mobile, and tablet. This is a bit more labor-intensive, but it ensures that each medium is tailor-made for its audience.
Caching is the technique used by browsers to store a page’s content in local storage. This is highly useful for visitors to your website, as it means they don’t have to download the same data every time they click on your homepage.
Enabling browser caching will help reduce loading time. It also reduces bandwidth consumption, cuts the number of requests to a server, and provides the visitor with a much better user experience.
Essentially, opting for a reliable caching technique will ensure repeat visitors have a smooth and seamless experience when using your website.
In the specific context of mobile page speed, you’ll want to enable server caching. Generally speaking, your server host will have taken care of that by providing a built-in server caching function with your web hosting plan.
If this isn’t the case, and you’re considering switching your host provider, you should select a provider that also supplies optimized configurations for mobile platforms and scalable resources to handle varying traffic levels efficiently. So you have everything you need for better mobile performance.
Server response time is a metric that describes the time it takes for a device to receive feedback from the server once a request has been sent to load a web page. This response time is measured by TTFB (Time To First Byte). In essence, TTFB measures the time it takes for your website to respond to requests.
Image sourced from gtmetrix.com
When users visit a website, all content, including texts, graphics, and source code, is processed by a server. The more content the website contains, the longer it takes for the server to process, resulting in an increased website loading time.
To counteract this, you can:
Of course, redirection is useful if you need to tell a search engine to find the site at another address. Alternatively, you may want to eliminate issues with subpages and bad links.
Do note that too many redirects can affect how quickly your website loads. As such, redirects should be kept to a maximum of one per link. Any website visitor who is redirected to another page will have to wait more time to get there.
Avoid this by reducing unnecessary redirections from your main page. You may not be able to get rid of all of them, but a quick audit should help you identify non-essential ones.
Lastly, regularly monitoring your mobile page speed is essential if you want to keep up the good work you’ve done so far, as well as take swift action in case you spot any issues. Consider incorporating these lab-based metrics into your monitoring:
By monitoring these metrics, you’ll have access to a precise table of data that will indicate where, if at all, you’re going wrong. Do keep in mind that monitoring both lab and field-based metrics is the best way to analyze loading speed and user experience, so don’t forget to pay attention to field-based metrics, too.
“Why is my WordPress site so slow?”
You’re not alone in this head-scratcher. In fact, WordPress is infamous for how quickly a website can bloat due to excessive resources and unoptimized themes and plugins. Here’s how to address this.
Implement lazy loading for improved performance
If your website is taking 20 seconds to load due to one or two images that aren’t even visible until visitors scroll way down, then lazy loading could be the trick for you.
Lazy loading uses special scripts that help delay the loading of images, videos, or graphics that are not immediately displayed to users.
To get started with lazy loading, try out the NitroPack Lazy Loading feature.
Whenever someone visits your website, the browser is required to request many different files, which are otherwise known as HTTP requests.
Naturally, these HTTP requests impact how quickly your page is able to load. You can minimize HTTP requests by:
You can also implement lazy loading—as seen above—and use a Content Delivery Network (CDN).
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a network of proxy servers and their data centers that are geographically distributed.
They help improve content delivery, performance, and quality by caching web content (e.g., pages, images, and videos) in proxy servers close to your location.
You may also want to explore mobile CDNs. These aim to enhance content delivery, specifically on mobile and wireless networks. As such, they aim to greatly improve website performance.
However, be aware that privacy may be an issue. In that case, .env files are a useful way of keeping sensitive information away from the cloud and locked up in a key-value format.
Render-blocking resources are bits of code in website files, such as CSS and JavaScript, that are used to prevent a web page from loading too quickly.
When you load a page, the browser parses its HTML. If it encounters CSS and JavaScript files, it has to both download and parse these too. This inevitably means the page takes longer to load.
If the page doesn’t parse these resources, it’s able to load quicker. Therefore, exploring render-blocking resources improves website loading and user experience. To find out how to identify and eliminate render-blocking resources without using any plugins, check out this comprehensive guide.
Resource hints are instructions that let the browser know how to handle particular resources or web pages. These hints can be used to tell the browser which resources should be prioritized.
You can integrate the HTML code snippets on your website that correspond to the elements that need to be prioritized into your site page; this will have the browser start loading the selected files sooner than if it was finding them through the normal course of loading the page.
Different resource hints can be used for different purposes; below are two examples:
If you want to learn more about the resource hints, check out our comprehensive guide.
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is an open-source technology that was developed in 2015 to help enhance immediate web page development. Its main purpose is to reduce pages to their most crucial parts, storing the cached version on Google servers to optimize server performance.
Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) focus more on user experience and interaction. They aim to make mobile websites more closely resemble the apps on your smartphone.
They help your web page load faster. However, there is the potential for lag and high battery consumption as they run on a third-party browser. So, you’ll have to investigate to figure out which is appropriate for your mobile website.
Incorporating AI into website speed optimization is increasingly significant. This is because AI tools can significantly reduce load times by predicting user behaviors to create sophisticated caching methods and pre-load pages or assets before users even click on them.
Additionally, they can be used to automate tasks such as automatically resizing and compressing images and improving code efficiency by continuously monitoring and optimizing performance in real-time.
One such tool is Navigation AI by NitroPack.
Navigation AI is an AI-powered web browsing optimizer that actively predicts and analyzes user behavior to prerender entire pages during the customer journey.
It allows site owners, regardless of their platform, to offer instant browsing experiences on both desktop and mobile, boosting customer engagement and conversion rates along the way.
The way Navigation AI does it is by using Speculation Rules API:
This predictive page loading leads to the following:
With mobile traffic accounting for nearly half of all website traffic on a global scale, it should be clear by now that optimizing your mobile website performance is crucial.
Follow our tips above and apply the mentioned optimization techniques to reap important benefits, such as increased user engagement with your website, as well as increased lead generation and sales.
We’re certain that with a bit of time, effort, and focus, your mobile performance will outstrip all competitors.
Niko has 5+ years of experience turning those “it’s too technical for me” topics into “I can’t believe I get it” content pieces. He specializes in dissecting nuanced topics like Core Web Vitals, web performance metrics, and site speed optimization techniques. When he’s taking a breather from researching his next content piece, you’ll find him deep into the latest performance news.
