Do you care for your mobile website users?

Hmm, do you actually care for them?

For the ones that are always on the go, with their mobile phone all the time in their hand, looking for information, services or products?

Aren’t you one of them?

Ask yourself how many times you searched for a product website, or a service or a place and you were totally frustrated because the website was loading so slowly. You have to admit it, more often than expected. Especially, in those areas when the 3G or 4G connection is not that great….

Why should you pay attention to mobile speed?

Well, it is a kind of a dumb question I am using to give you some statistics on the matter if you are not yet convinced in the need of mobile speed optimization or have never been really upset by a slow loading website on your smartphone.

Let’s have a look at the stats:

• More than half of the mobile sites are abandoned if the page loads over 3 seconds;
• 3 out of 4 mobile sites take more than 10 seconds to load;
• The average mobile website load time is 19 seconds;
• There is a clear connection between speed and revenue as mobile sites which load within 5 seconds earn 2X more ad revenue than those who load within 19 seconds;

Think again, how many times you just switched off your smartphone or hit back button when a website was slowly loading? A lot more than website owners wished you to do so.

Why mobile sites should be really fast?

Because speed matters. People who look for information on their smartphones are usually in a hurry. For example, if you need to book a plane ticket or find a specific place when you are abroad.

Real situation: I was stuck in an airport once because of some adverse weather conditions which means lots of snow. I had two flights booked with connection in London Heathrow. When booking, I kept in mind the fact that was winter and sometimes flying can be really complicated, so I allowed plenty of time between the flights.

What happened? The first flight was very late and at some point whole situation was suggesting that I will miss my connection. I was stuck at the gate and wondering what to do. One option was to fly to London and either sleep at the airport or find a hotel for the night. The other was to reschedule my second flight while at the gate (because it will be cheaper and there was a chance if I do not hurry I will miss that one too) and fly another day.

I chose the second. To be honest, I still remember how slow the website of the second airline was loading on my phone. This is what I remember. Trying to re-book a flight from the gate while listening to distressed children and their parents.

Maybe the website was very slow or I was very much frustrated and it seemed very slow. I do not know. I think particularly airline websites should be loading under 3 seconds because similar situations just happen.

Caring for your mobile website speed means caring for your customers

It is as simple as that. And if you are not sure if your website’s mobile speed is good, just do some tests. Testing will give you insights on issues your website have and some suggestions on how to fix them. Some of the most popular tools can be used to measure your mobile website speed such as PageSpeed, Testmysite.io, GTMetrix, Pingdom and Webpagetest.org.

What can you do?

Usually, the slow performance is due to the fact that mobile web pages are extremely heavy. The average mobile web page is 2.5 MB in size. Which means that it will need 13 seconds to load even with the fastest 3G/4G connection.

It is important to make sure that the server requests are not many and your page size content is less than the average. The average content size is 1.49MB and it takes about 7 seconds to load over fast 3G connection.

Other important measures are optimizing images and CSS files, minifying resources and leveraging browser caching.

You can also prioritize visible content. For mobile sites, you can opt in for the most important content. You do not need everything that you have on your desktop site to be present on you mobile one. Especially, when mobile users do not have time to read everything you have to say on their smartphone.

New approach

There are many ways for you to deliver the best mobile experience for your users. If you are selling products, you can choose lighter solutions for you online shop and take advantage of the advances in eCommerce delivery solutions that will improve your mobile website loading speed. For instance, you can have a fast online shop with React.js and Node.js.

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The bottom line is that you will lose more when you offer bad mobile experience and have less conversions when you do not put some effort in mobile website optimization.

Have a look at WebAdviser.io : We are using AI + real experts to offer web design/development and optimization services for businesses and individuals.

Originally published at webadviser.io.

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Data & stats used in the text and banners are from: https://storage.googleapis.com/doubleclick-prod/documents/The_Need_for_Mobile_Speed_-_FINAL.pdf & https://www.statista.com/topics/1185/mobile-commerce/