Significance of Mobile Site's Load Time & Ways To Optimize It

With mobile devices capturing 65% of total digital time worldwide, it's clear that optimizing your eCommerce website for a better mobile experience is essential for boosting conversions. Unfortunately, BaseKit's survey of 510 small businesses showed that 91% of eCommerce websites are not yet mobile-optimized. What's more, the average page load time for U.S. retail mobile sites is 6.9 seconds, which is far too long for 40% of mobile users who expect a page to load in 3 seconds or less. Therefore, if your mobile site takes more than 3 seconds to load, you could be missing out on conversions in 2023 and beyond.

1. Is Optimizing the Speed of Your Mobile Site Necessary?

The big question is, do you need to optimize your mobile site speed? The answer is a definite YES! With the large number of mobile users accessing websites on their devices, mobile site speed optimization has become an important part of website design.

Here are some important reasons to make your site speed a priority.

User Experience

We are sure you have experienced the frustration of slow-loading mobile web pages many times. Unfortunately, your customers feel the same way. Research shows that 53% of mobile users abandon a page if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. In today's digital world, people are much more likely to use their mobile devices for browsing.

As such, it is essential that brands provide a fast, seamless mobile experience or risk losing customers to competitors. Mobile usage now accounts for 65% of all digital time, making it more important than ever to ensure pages load quickly and efficiently.

AdWords Quality Score

There are multiple search engines available across the internet. Being present in all of them can be advantageous because of the larger audience. However, it also causes the problem of keeping a tap on every search engine's ranking. Therefore, using a SERPs inspection tool will assist you in recording your performance on every search engine. As a result, you will be able to know your position and work on it more efficiently.

Backlink Maintenance Tool

Google states that page speed is a critical factor in determining your landing page conversion rate and has a significant effect on your Quality Score. Sadly, many businesses are unaware of this fact. Consequently, they put time, money, and effort into creating landing pages that fail to convert.

If your website takes too long to load when a visitor clicks on your ad, they are more likely to leave your page. This makes Google's search engine believe that your landing page is not suitable to be ranked highly.

The faster your page loads, the better your Quality Score will be. Quality Score affects your Cost Per Click (CPC), meaning that having good page speed can drastically reduce your ad costs.

To sum up, the better your page speed is, the better your Quality Score will be. This will in turn lead to more efficient ad spending, allowing your ads to reach a wider audience.

SERP Rankings

There is a clear link between page speed and a site's SERP ranking. Google gives preference to sites that load quickly, making them more likely to be listed higher in organic rankings.

When comparing two websites with comparable domain authority, content quality, and backlink profiles, Google tends to prioritize the one with better page speed. Thus, it is essential for any website to optimize its loading speed to maximize its SERP ranking.

2. Why Is Load Time Important For Google?

Google conducted a study to assess the impact of page loading time on user behavior. Upon asking visitors if they would prefer 10 or 30 search results per page, the majority voted in favor of 30 results. As an experiment, Google applied 30 results to some search pages.

Surprisingly, traffic dropped by 20%! Even more striking is that the difference in loading time between pages was just half a second.

It is clear that even a small improvement in page load time can make a significant difference in user engagement. Imagine the impact of reducing page loading time by a second or two!

With the help of Ecommerce SEO Tools, you can check the page speed as well as the mobile-friendliness of your website with ease.

3. How To Check Your Mobile Site’s Load Time?

It is well known that speed is one of the most important factors when it comes to user experience and website performance. It is also no secret that slow loading times can lead to an increase in user frustration, higher bounce rates, and decreased conversions. The importance of site speed is well documented above, and yet many website owners and marketers overlook it.

As you already know, slow loading times can cause visitors to click away, leading to lost opportunities and revenue. Additionally, search engines like Google use speed as an important ranking factor. Thus, checking the speed of your website is crucial to ensure your visitors stay on your site and have a seamless experience.

However, the main question is how to check the speed loading time of your website. Well, you can use our Page Speed Checker tool to get a detailed report on your page speed insights.

This report provides an in-depth analysis of the load times of CSS links, script links, image links, and other resource links. This analysis will help you identify areas of improvement, ensuring your website is running at its optimal speed and performance.

4. How to Decrease Page Load Time?

Discovering your mobile site's load time is just the beginning! Now, it's time to optimize it for faster speed. Spend a few minutes to implement these 10 tips for boosting your site's loading speed.

Optimize The Caches

Optimizing mobile browser caches is essential for reducing the page loading time, as mobile caches are unable to store large amounts of content, unlike desktop browsers. To avoid unnecessary server requests, ensure that your mobile browser is utilizing its local memory to cache resources.

Embed Resources in HTML

While this is an incredible way to decrease loading time, be wary of this great technique as it could also enlarge the page size and counteract optimization efforts. Investing in an application that permits the embedding of site resources in HTML and only when needed is a prudent choice.

Reduce JavaScript Parsing

Surprisingly, mobile browsers tend to take longer to parse JavaScript, adding extra seconds to a website's loading time. To decrease the load time of your mobile site, delay the parsing of unnecessary [<script> tags].

Eliminate all the redirects

Redirects can be time-consuming to process, so it is beneficial to eliminate them. Allow your users to access the mobile site directly, but make sure to provide a link to the main (desktop) website for those who prefer it. You can use free SEO tools to get insight into your URL redirects.

Optimize CSS & JavaScript

Eliminate unneeded characters from the source code, without affecting its functionality. Minify all JavaScript and CSS to reduce data usage and enhance caching.

Design your mobile site using HTML5 & CSS3

HTML5 and CSS3 contribute to faster loading times as they are lightweight, making it simpler for developers to build a great, fully-operational, and navigable site without having to stay up late.

Resize the images

Make your mobile site load quickly by resizing and optimizing images. Utilize lightweight images as they require less bandwidth and will be processed quickly. It's also important to optimize your images.

Change clicks with touch events

Mobile site buttons typically have a delay of 1-7 seconds after being clicked. Replacing the click event with a touch event can reduce this delay.

Use AJAX to increase the website's speed

AJAX can help reduce your site's load time by allowing the data to be retrieved from the server without needing to be refreshed each time. This means that the necessary content is processed while the visitor is still navigating the page.

Utilize effective CDN

Follow the example of the leading e-commerce businesses in the USA, which use an effective CDN such as Amazon CloudFront, to reduce page load times. Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) distribute pages and content to users based on their geographical location; 45% of the top 2,000 e-commerce sites in the USA are taking advantage of this technology.

In Conclusion

If you've been investing money to create interesting and engaging content, it's important to pause and ask: Does it take too long to load? This is especially true for mobile sites; a slow page speed can lead to a drop in Google rankings and reduced conversions. Every second matters when it comes to providing a great user experience, and shaving off even a few seconds from your loading time could go a long way in improving satisfaction and boosting conversions.

What do you think of these tips? Got a question about something you read? Leave a comment now and let us know.