It’s something that is almost taken for granted. When visitors come to your website, they want it to be just as easy on the phone as it is on their desktop. Approximately 55% of global website traffic comes via mobile devices, which is why you must optimise your web for mobile performance. How can you do this? Here are 8 effective methods.
1. Test your website
The first thing you need to do is to see how your website is already doing in terms of mobile-friendliness, which will help you to look at specific parts of your website that need extra work. Google created a great tool that you can use for free, which you can access here.
2. Choose a responsive design
Responsive website design is critical to the overall experience, as it will adjust to different screen sizes. When you are finding the best responsive design, consider some of the following components:
- Avoiding pop-ups.
- Making online forms easy to fill out.
- Have big Calls-to-Action.
- Collapse the content into a column.
- Improve overall navigation.
3. Understand the website’s Core Web Vitals
In addition to testing your website, you need to understand the three Core Web Vitals, a set of metrics that provide insight into the user experience. These three are:
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).
- First Input Delay (FID).
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP).
These Core Web Vitals have a direct impact on your SEO and rankings, so you must test them.
4. Compress your images
Images are critical for engaging website content, and in the world of digital marketing, visual content is vital. You need to make sure your images are correctly fitted for mobile by compressing them so you can reduce the file size and increase your website speed. There are a number of great tools online that can help you, such as Compress JPG and Tiny PNG.
5. Find a reliable web hosting provider
The right web host is one of the most important decisions you will make. Choosing the wrong plan that doesn’t offer you what you need in terms of resources and speed will result in a poorly performing website. When choosing the right web provider, you should consider some of the following:
- Average time.
- Pricing.
- Bandwidth and storage.
- Security.
- SSL certificates.
6. Improve the website loading times
To increase mobile engagement, you must optimise your website for speed to keep the bounce rate down and improve user experience. Testing the Core Web Vitals will help you understand how long it takes to load, so you can incorporate some of the following to increase website speed:
- Using up-to-date software, such as your plugins and CMS.
- Incorporate cache.
- Optimising your code.
7. Implement “lazy loading”
If your website does not load on a visitor’s mobile device, they will click away in a matter of seconds. The more content you have on your web pages, such as videos and images, the slower the load time. This is where lazy loading can be a perfect solution. Lazy loading is a design pattern used to defer the initialisation of an object until it is needed, ensuring only the required content appears. As the visitor scrolls down a web page, it will only show a fraction of the content at a time, which will decrease the load page time.
8. Opt for responsive themes and plugins
For website designers looking to create a WordPress webpage, the general rule of thumb is as long as you find the right plugins and themes you can pretty much guarantee your website is in good shape. Most popular themes are developed with mobile-friendliness in mind, taking a lot of work out of the equation for those people who don’t have a great understanding of building web pages. If you are wondering if a theme is responsive before you install or purchase it, you can check out the demo, which provides previews of the designs, including how they look on smaller screens, or you can use a staging website to test its mobile friendliness.
In conclusion, we hope this gives you some ideas of how to optimise your website for mobile performance. The great thing is that now you just need to go in the direction of the right resources and you’ve got everything you need. It’s never too difficult to optimise your website for mobile, but it’s always worth reaching out if you ever have any concerns. If you ever need any support, get in touch with us and we would love to help you.
