The performance of your website on mobile devices is now more crucial than on desktops
This is due to the fact that more people use their phones to access the internet than they do their computers.
According to StatCounter, mobile devices are used by more than half of all internet users globally. Only about 47% of people use desktop computers.
If you optimise your website primarily for desktop users, you are jeopardising your business’s success. Mobile is now more significant than ever before.
For SEO purposes, how well your site works on mobile is critical. Google has switched to a mobile-first indexing strategy. This means that Google indexes and ranks websites based on their mobile versions.
Your rating will suffer if your site is quick on desktop but slow on mobile. Your site’s mobile performance should take precedence over its desktop performance. However, optimising a site for smartphones is more difficult than optimising a site for desktops.
HOW TO CHECK WEBSITE SPEED?
The first thing you should do is check your site’s mobile speed. This will show you just how fast or slow your website is.
Just because your site loads quickly on a desktop computer doesn’t mean it will load quickly on a mobile device. It’s possible that your site is lightning quick on the desktop yet glacially slow on mobile.
Although there are other mobile testing tools available, I like Google’s Test My Site for mobile performance testing. Simply go to ThinkWithGoogle and enter your website’s URL. You should be able to test the speed of your website.
A site that loads in under three seconds is acceptable to me. However, Think With Google suggests that at the very least
TIPS TO LOAD YOUR WEBSITE FASTER ON THE MOBILE PHONE
This is the list of best practices that will help you to run your website faster on the mobile phone
- Responsive theme
A responsive theme is one that adapts to all types of devices. This implies that your theme will give customers a version of your website that is optimised for their device, whether they are on a desktop, mobile, or tablet.It’s critical to use a responsive theme. It is the foundation of a mobile-friendly website. You can choose from a variety of responsive themes. Any of the themes in the Top 10 of WordPress Themes are decent enough and responsive.
- Look for speedy web hosting services
Your web host is the most essential factor in increasing the speed of your website. Your website will load quickly on mobile if you use a fast web host with cutting-edge hosting technologies.You may not notice a big improvement in your website’s performance if your web host is slow.
Bluehost is a good choice for newbie websites.
- Use AMP
Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) effort aims to make mobile websites faster.AMP is designed for mobile surfing and can drastically reduce the time it takes for a page to load. According to a study, it can also lower the amount of inquiries by almost 77 percent.
Installing the official AMP plugin will get you started with AMP. Other AMP plugins are available, and you can use them as well.
After you’ve activated the plugin, you can pick from three different modes. Consider using the transitional or standard mode if the bulk of your visitors are on mobile. However, your theme must be AMP-ready.
- Lazy load images
Images can cause a website to load slowly, especially on mobile devices. The best approach to deal with them is to load them after the user has navigated to them.That way, they’ll only load when they’re needed, reducing load time to a minimum.
If you use PageSpeed insight or Web.dev to test your website and get a warning to “defer offscreen pictures,” that suggests images are slowing down your load speed and you should consider lazily loading them.
- Remove unused CSS
Website can be slowed down if it has a lot of unused CSS. CSS that is not required for a website to load is known as unused CSS. However, the browser must still download, parse, and process them since they are present.Perfmatters and Asset CleanUp are two plugins that can help you get rid of unneeded CSS.
- Have a decent caching system
Caching is a tried-and-true method of speeding up a website. To offer cached information to your mobile visitors, you need to employ an excellent caching plugin. WP Rocket is a high-performance premium caching plugin.Caching at the server level is available from the majority of managed web hosting businesses. Find out if your web server provides this service, and if so, request that it be activated for your site if it is not available out of the box.
You can ask your web server to install and activate Varnish cache on your behalf. Varnish cache is well-known for its ability to speed up websites.
- Code minimization
The process of condensing a website’s code from a bigger to a smaller size is known as minification. As long as it does not break anything, the smaller the better.You should think about minifying your JS and CSS.
The majority of caching plugins have minification capabilities. However, you should test using staging because minification has been known to break websites.
- Enable compression
Compress files to help your mobile website load faster. The smaller the items on your site, the faster it will be.By compressing website files, Gzip or Brotli can dramatically improve website speed. Brotli is often superior to Gzip. However, any of these will suffice. Check with your site host to see if compression is available to you.
If a plugin option is more acceptable for you, there are other plugins that can assist you with enabling compression.
- Use a CDN
A Content Delivery Network can make your website load faster by creating a static duplicate of it and serving it to users all over the world from a location closer to them when they try to view it. - Use a system track front
I was recently attempting to reduce the time it took for this page to load on mobile devices. So I stopped using Google font and switched to system stack, and I was pleasantly surprised at how much faster it was.Although Google Fonts and Font Awesome are fantastic, they can cause a website to load slowly. Because the typeface of whatever device the user is using is required, employing system stack ensures that no external queries are made.
Some themes make switching to the system stack simple. Switch to the system stack.
- Use newer PHP versions
PHP versions that are newer are usually speedier than previous versions. You should make sure you’re using the most recent PHP version, or at least one version behind. Not only for the sake of speed, but also for the sake of security.