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3 Ways to Speed Up Your Mobile Website for Better SEO

A fast mobile website is more important than ever for better search engine rankings.

In mid-2018, Google rolled out its Speed Update. This update made page speed a major ranking factor in mobile search results.

Even if your page has excellent content, your search engine rankings could still suffer if you have a slow mobile website.

A slow website could also impact your conversion rate. According to a recent survey, 53% of people will leave a mobile website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.

Visitors will leave before you have the opportunity to convince them to do business with you.

In this blog post, we are going to break down three steps for improving your mobile website’s speed.

Let’s get started.

Assess your mobile website’s current speed.

Before you take measures to improve your website speed, you need to know where you currently stand. Armed with the necessary data, you can then measure your progress on a weekly, monthly or yearly basis.

There are plenty of tools online that allow you to measure your website speed.

PageSpeed Insights is a free tool created by Google. It measures your website speed using data from Google Chrome users. Enter your URL and wait for PageSpeed Insights to generate results.

It will score your website speed and offer improvement suggestions. The most common suggestions include optimising CSS files and image sizes.

GTMetrix is another tool that measures your website speed. Like PageSpeed Insights, all you have to do is enter a URL and hit enter.

The results provided by GTMetrix are more detailed. It rates every single improvement area depending on importance. This is helpful so website owners which changes to prioritise.

For example, you could get an A for “Minify CSS” and an F for “Optimise images.” This means that your CSS files are perfectly optimised, but the image sizes you are using need improvement.

Leverage browser caching.

When a visitor opens a website, their browser downloads all its files. This includes HTML files, CSS files, images and more. The more files a website has, the longer it takes to download.

Browser caching could speed up this process. It saves specific files on your device storage. The browser will not have to download them when the user visits the website again. This significantly improves the website’s page load time.

If you are unsure how to do this without professional assistance, there are several WordPress plugins you can utilise.

WP Rocket is a page caching WordPress plugin. According to its website, the plugin can speed up your website with no coding required. After your install WP Rocket, you can activate it right away.

W3 Total Cache is another page caching WordPress plugin. It states that plugin users have seen an improvement of up to 80% in bandwidth savings, making their websites faster than ever.

Minify resources.

Each website is composed of several HTML, CSS, and Javascript files. These files tell your website how it should look, act, or respond to certain user requests. The more files your website needs, the longer it will take to load.

To speed up the load times for these files, you can minify them.

Minifying a file is the act of removing unnecessary elements from it.

An HTML file could contain several line breaks, spaces, and other characters. These characters make understanding code easier for web developers, but browsers do not need them.

A minified version will no longer contain all those characters.

According to Minify Code, that minification process can reduce the size of a code file by 10% to 95%.

Minify Code is a website that allows you to minify HTML, CSS, and Javascript files for free. Access their website and select which minifier you would like to use.

You can copy and paste your code and hit enter. The website will then return a minified version of your original code.

If you have too many files or are unsure how to minify a file on your own, you can use WP Rocket instead. Aside from browser caching, the plugin can also minify files.

Keep in mind that WP Rocket is not free. The good thing is, they do not charge a monthly or yearly subscription fee. You only have to purchase the plugin once.

Autoptimize is another WordPress plugin you can try. This plugin is solely focused on minifying resources and can be used for free.

Conclusion

Visitors are now used to getting the information they need in a snap.

To avoid getting left behind in search engine rankings, you need to ensure that your mobile website is as fast as possible.

Assess how fast your website currently is, so you can track your progress.

Leverage browser caching. Browsers will only have to download files once, speeding up your website’s page load time.

Minifying resources makes your HTML, CSS and Javascript files smaller and faster to download.

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Darlyn Herradura

A self-professed book and digital marketing nerd, Darlyn Herradura focuses on building trust between customers and businesses with the written word. She understands that creating valuable content is the best way to get found online and happily spends her time doing that.