You’re probably reading this blog post on your phone.
Your mobile website is key to how you connect with your audience. But if it’s slow when accessed from a mobile device, that’s a problem. You need to figure out if your website is slow specifically on mobile. That might require some optimization.
In this article, we’ll give you some performance tips for speeding up your mobile site, including the best way to optimize your content for a mobile device:
1. Use a responsive WordPress theme
No matter what kind of device someone is viewing your WordPress site on, it will look good if you have a responsive theme.
The first thing you need to do is go to the preview mode for each theme or page builder you are considering. Then, check to see if the site looks good on both desktop and mobile devices. If it does, then the theme or page builder is responsive.
Check the customizer or the options of your theme. For example, the Astra theme offers a mobile view when building a custom header:
- Start building your page and see the options offered by your page builder. Divi or Elementor page builders have this type of responsive section.
2. Enable mobile caching
To reduce the load on an application and its servers, mobile caching is a common technique. This technique stores local data so that high-speed apps and games can run smoothly without constant download requests. The goal is to reduce bandwidth usage, network perceived lag, and battery consumption.
The WP Rocket plugin allows you to implement a mobile cache in one click.
3. Optimize images for mobile
Image optimization for mobile involves creating and delivering images in a format that will improve user engagement on their phone.
We recommend you follow the following techniques to make sure your images are well optimized on mobile:
- Resize images to save bandwidth: 640 by 320 pixels are usually a good standard to follow. You can also keep the “4:3 aspect ratio” as a rule of thumb for your images on mobile.
- Compress images to make your files smaller: find the right balance between the quality and size of the image.
- Choose the correct file format: WebP is the best image format you can use on mobile (and on desktop). It provides superior lossless and lossy compression for images on the web.
What we can conclude:
- WebP offers 25% smaller file sizes than PNG and JPG – with the same quality
- WebP loads faster (due to file size) than PNG or JPG images.
Use Imagify to optimize your images on mobile. The main features include all the best practices we just listed:
- Resize and compress mobile images in bulk or one-by-one without losing quality
- Convert all your files automatically to WebP
Would you like to try Imagify? You can use it for free for up to 200 images each month.
4. Implement lazy loading on your images and videos
This means that users do not need to wait for the images and videos off-screen to load. The final key to optimizing images for mobile devices is to use a ‘lazy loading’ script. This type of script delays the loading of images that are not currently being viewed by the user. This can improve page loading times, as users don’t need to wait for images and videos that are off-screen to load.
This plugin enables lazy loading on your images and videos, which means that they will only be loaded when they are visible on the screen. This will improve your website’s performance by reducing the number of HTTP requests and loading only the necessary data.
5. Optimize image delivery with a CDN
Improving mobile page speed is key, and one way to do that is by optimizing image delivery. This may require using multiple servers so that rendered data can be quickly accessed from anywhere in the world. This is the basic idea behind a CDN.
RocketCDN can be used to improve the loading speed of images on mobile devices.
6. Improve time to first byte
The goal is to make your website load as fast as possible. The goal is to make your website load quickly for mobile visitors so they don’t think your site is slow. A fast hosting provider that supports Gzip compression and a cache plugin can help reduce server processing time. A plugin like WP Rocket can help clean your database, activate Gzip compression, cache your pages, and more to speed up your site.
Use WP Rocket to reduce TTFB.
7. Eliminate render-blocking resources
If you want your mobile site to load quickly, you should avoid loading unnecessary resources at the top of your code. This includes JS and CSS files that are not needed.
You can improve loading time by delivering critical JS and CSS inline and deferring all non-critical JS and styles. You can also save time by removing unused code. WP Rocket can help you to load JS deferred and remove unused CSS.
You can also delay JS execution, which is often one of the main culprits for a slow mobile site:
If you don’t want to use a WordPress plugin, you can use the defer and async attributes and apply the tags yourself.
8. Reduce page weight
A page that is not as heavy will load more quickly on mobile. A page that is heavy generally has videos, images, scripts, styles, and fonts. The best way to reduce the weight of your page is to optimize your images, use text compression (GZIP), and combine/minify your code.
WP Rocket is an easy way to implement GZIP and minify CSS and JS files with just a few clicks.
9. Get rid of whatever might challenge mobiles
Try not to use any sliders, animation, pre loaders, or pop-ups for your mobile visitors.
If you use a lot of images, animations, and other elements, your page will take longer to load, use more data, and require more requests. Try to use fewer images and cache data on your device to make things simpler and faster.
AMP can be helpful, but if used incorrectly, it can also harm your rankings. Even though the Google Page Experience factors in Visual Stability, Mobile Friendliness, and Intrusive Interstitials, you could still hurt your ranking if you use too many heavy elements like layouts, properties, and JS on mobile. And even though AMP can be helpful, using it incorrectly could also cause your ranking to drop.
10. Have your full-page cache delivered through CDN
In addition to caching, you can use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) service, just like Cloudflare’s AnycastCDN.
A CDN means that a visitor is close to your servers no matter where they are in the world.
The page would load equally no matter where the mobile user is if a CDN was used.
11. Choose fast web hosting
No matter how much work you do to improve your mobile page speed, it won’t make a difference if you have unreliable web hosting.
It’s not entirely the web hosting company’s fault if their servers make your website load slowly for mobile visitors. You should do your research on the provider and their infrastructure to make sure you picked a plan that would help speed things up.
Here are some things to think about:
Where are the web host’s servers located?
If the servers are not close to you or your target audience, the loading time will be slow.
A good idea is to look for hosts that offer top service in your country or area. Here are some good places to start:
- Best WordPress Hosting Europe
- Best WordPress Hosting UK
- Best WordPress Hosting India
- Best WordPress Hosting Australia
- Best WordPress Hosting OVERALL
Using a CDN can also lead to improved website performance. If you are dissatisfied with the physical location of your web hosting servers, you can improve your hosting by using a content delivery network (CDN). One of the top CDN providers can help decrease the distance between your website and its visitors. In addition, using a CDN can also help improve website performance.
A CDN is a good idea if your website has a global audience.
Does the web host offer niche hosting?
If you’re planning to build a WordPress website, it’s a good idea to look into hosting companies that have servers specifically designed to run WordPress.
As inventories and traffic on eCommerce websites grow larger, the need for more processing power increases. The best eCommerce hosting solutions will ensure that mobile traffic and transactions can be processed quickly.
If you’re using a CMS other than WordPress, there are hosting solutions for Joomla, Drupal, as well.
Did you purchase managed hosting?
Managed WordPress hosting is a great option for those who want to work with a provider that is familiar with their content management system. In addition, managed WordPress hosting can help you maintain your website.
Website maintenance includes tasks like making sure the site’s software is up to date, backing up site data, and ensuring the site’s security measures are effective. Website owners can outsource website maintenance to a hosting company that will manage these tasks for a fee.
Even if you don’t choose to go with a managed hosting service, there’s no need to worry. The tips below will show you how to make the necessary performance optimizations yourself.
Is the web host known for technology stacks optimized for mobile page speed?
When you are considering a web hosting provider, it is also important to look at the technology stack that they are using. This will give you an idea of the kinds of features and capabilities that their platform has.
- Do they use NGINX?
- Are the servers equipped with caching?
- Are CDN upgrades available?
- Do servers run on the latest versions of software?
There are many ways to make your WordPress website faster. Look for WordPress hosts that will help improve your website speed.
Is your hosting plan scalable?
If you have a successful website it will quickly outgrow a shared hosting account and you will have to upgrade to a VPS or managed WordPress hosting account. Make sure to consider the scalability of your hosting plan to accommodate for a successful website. Shared hosting accounts have their limits and you might have to upgrade to a VPS or managed WordPress hosting account down the line.
If you can impress mobile visitors from the start, you can anticipate a significant increase in traffic. Therefore, it is essential to have a web host that can scale server resources to match that traffic.
The following companies have offers that can be scaled to meet your needs: Kinsta, Cloudways, WP Engine, InMotion Hosting.
You may also be interested in:
- Figma vs Sketch vs Adobe XD: Which Is the Better Design Tool?
- Cookieless Tracking: What Is It, Plus How to Use It on Your Site Effectively?
- 20+ Best Shopify Themes for 2022 That Improve Your Sales
The programming language PHP is used to create the structure of a WordPress website. Although you may not do any coding with PHP, it is always running on the server level and can affect the speed of a mobile page if it is not updated.
This benchmarking study from Cloudways explains the importance of using the latest version of PHP:
The latest version of PHP can process more HTTP requests per second than older versions.
WordPress should automatically select the latest version of PHP, but unless you have managed PHP updates enabled, this is something you will need to keep tabs on.
If you’re lucky, it’s easy to update PHP on your own.
Log into your web hosting account
The way that every host’s control panel is set up is different, so what you see here might not be exactly the same as what you see on your end.
Review the current PHP version
Look for the current PHP version used.
SiteGround updates the server to the latest version but still lets users know which version is being used.
If you need to make any changes, open the list of available PHP versions and select the one you want to use:
13. Implement caching at all levels
As users, we’re familiar with caching at the browser level. It’s usually when we can’t see updated content on a web page that we turn to these settings.
Users can delete the stored copy of the site from their browser so that the latest version will appear the next time they visit it.
Caching is a great way to improve website performance. Cached data is stored in the browser so that the server doesn’t have to process the same page multiple times, which can help speed things up.
If servers are able to cache pages and create static copies of pages that have not changed, they will function much more efficiently.
You can use two resources to enable caching.
Enable server caching (benefits both desktop and mobile page speed)
This is not something you should have to worry about. As mentioned earlier, a good web host will have server caching built into your web hosting plan.
To make sure you have all the server-side caching that you need, look it up in your hosting control panel. Like PHP, it should be easy to find:
Enable website, database, and object caching
You can improve your WordPress site’s performance by using a caching plugin, which will enable other forms of caching.
With this plugin, you can quickly enable or disable a caching system.
This means that you don’t have to spend time figuring out which types of caching to enable (for example, website, browser, database, opcode, mem cache, etc.) and you don’t have to select every option that could potentially speed up your website.
Other speed-up settings are available from caching plugins.
If you upgrade, you’ll get access to performance-enhancing features like image optimization, CDN configuration, and mobile caching.
Wrapping up
It is important to improve the speed of a mobile site. Prioritize by finding out what the most common tasks are for your customers on mobile.
Building scenarios allows you to see which content and pages are most important to optimize.
As more visitors use smartphones to access websites, it is important for websites to be optimized for them in order to provide the best possible experience.
The old methods for optimizing websites for desktop computers do not work well for mobile devices.