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

By Entrepreneur India Staff

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

You're reading Entrepreneur India, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media.

The Offbeat story

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.

Let us know your views on these quick tips by leaving a quick comment below right now.

Related Topics

Business Plans

How You Can Use the 80/20 Rule to Unlock Success and Maximize Your Impact

Our success is determined by where we focus our efforts.

Buy a Franchise

Learn the Secrets of Running 20+ Businesses as a Side Hustle — Finding and Nurturing Your 'STIC People'

Explore the critical importance of choosing the right franchise manager and the innovative 'STIC' approach.

Growing a Business

More Than 90% of Startups Don't Make It. This CEO Reveals What It Takes to Not Only Survive — But Thrive.

Learn what it takes to grow a company while also scaling as a leader.

Business News

This Influencer Has Nearly 150,000 Instagram Followers and Makes Over $10,000 a Month. There's Just One Catch—She's Not Real.

Aitana López has over 149,000 Instagram followers and brands love her. Is she the future of social media marketing?

Starting a Business

How Business Community Is Making CEO Life Less Ghastly

People are starting to notice that if you want to get the best out of entrepreneurs, you have to support them. But how?

Growing a Business

4 Key Things You Need to Know About Your Business to Truly Succeed

The new book, "The Third Paradigm," identifies the pillars that form a solid foundation for business success.