How to Improve Website Loading Speed in Mobile

Last updated on September 5th, 2024 at 05:10 am

Most web developers and site administrators care about their website’s speed and performance. It is important to optimize website speed in mobile to improve customer experience and search engine ranking. Otherwise, people will leave your site quickly and also your search engine rankings will go down. This is even more important when loading your website on a mobile since they have limited resources and processing capability. Therefore, it is important to research and implement different techniques to speed up your website in mobile. Here are some website speed optimization tips to help you reduce page loading time in mobile.

How to Reduce Loading Time in Mobile

Here are some important tips to improve website loading speed in mobile.

1. Upgrade your software

One of the easiest ways to reduce website loading speed in mobile is to simply upgrade every software that supports your website.

It means upgrading the operating system, web server, database server and any other software used by your website. Every software update not only improves speed but also reduces memory footprint, thereby reducing page load time and saving server costs. It also includes critical security updates.

Ubuntu 18 is mush faster than Ubuntu 16, Apache 2.4 is faster than Apache 2.2, MySQL 8.0 is twice as fast as some of the older versions!

So create a backup of your website & database, and upgrade the different software in your tech stack to speed up your mobile website.

Bonus Read : Top 5 XML Sitemap Generator

2. Minimize HTML resources

Large files take a lot of time to load and slow down your website. One of the most popular ways to improve website speed on mobile is to simply minify HTML resources such as CSS, JS and HTML files.

There are many minifiers like Refresh-SF that automatically clean up your code and minimize it, thereby reducing their load time. Once you have minified your HTML resources, update your web pages to refer to their minified versions.

Bonus Read : How to Prevent SEO bots from crawling your site

3. Optimize images

Big images consume a lot of data bandwidth due to their large size and drastically slow down every website. Here are some tips to speed up images on your websites:

• Avoid high resolution images. Crop images to 1200x1200px which is more than enough for laptops, mobile devices and workstations.
• Use JPG and PNG images instead of bitmaps and .gif files, which are large.
• Use lazy loading JS plugins such as Jquery Lazy that load images only when user scrolls over them.
• Prevent Image Hotlinking

Bonus Read : How to Remove Trailing Slash in Apache

4. Enable GZIP compression

Web servers have the ability to compress website content before sending it to client browsers. Browsers have the ability to automatically uncompress this content before rendering it on user’s screen.

This can reduce file size by up to 90% and speed up website greatly. You just need to enable GZIP compression on your web servers to avail this feature.

Here’s how to enable GZIP compression in Apache web server.

5. Reduce Number of Requests

Too many HTTP server requests can badly slow down your website. When a web page loads, browser makes a separate request to load each file (CSS, JS, HTML, images, etc) on your web page.

Here are a couple of tips to reduce number of requests:

• Combine multiple CSS/JS files into single file.
• Use CSS sprites instead of images
• Enable KeepAlive header in your web server. This way browser will use a single connection to make multiple requests, instead of making separate connections for each request.
• Put JS scripts at the bottom of your page so that the page is loaded before any of the scripts are loaded. Otherwise the page elements will render only after the scripts are loaded and run.
• Enable browser caching

Also, pick a good web hosting service provider.

6. Remove Unnecessary JS Scripts

Over time, every website become bloated with a lot of JavaScript functions and this can slow down your website. Review your JS code regularly and try to optimize it by removing or optimizing JS script. Also, many JavaScript functions are blocking. So they slow down your website unnecessarily. Run only those JS functions required to quickly render the page, and run the rest of the functions later or asynchronously. This will improve your website speed a lot.

Also, to speed up development, teams tend to use many external plugins and libraries that contain a lot of JavaScript bloat. They may also contain bugs. So be careful while adding external plugins to your website. The popular ones tend to be comprehensive and consequently quite bloated with a lot of unnecessary code. Go for stable, light weight ones instead of popular bloated ones.

7. Remove Unnecessary Redirects

Over time, web pages are moved around or deleted and they are replaced by a redirection to another new page. As website grows, there can be too many redirects on a website. Each redirect adds extra few seconds to a web page loading and this can slow down your site unnecessarily.

Therefore, it is important to identify and remove unnecessary redirects on your website.

8. Use free Diagnostic Tools

There are plenty of free online diagnostic tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights that scan your web pages and clearly list out areas of improvement as far as speed and performance are concerned. Use them to your advantage. Each tool gives a detailed report for performance improvements. You can review and implement their suggestions.

9. Use Accelerated Mobile Pages

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is a web standard created by Google to help web developers easily optimize their web pages for fast loading on mobile devices. In this case, we need to setup our web pages in such a way that Google will do most of the heavy tasks such as caching and page loading, thereby rendering your web pages within 1 second.

You can reconfigure your web pages as per AMP specifications. This is also known as Canonical AMP. But some people may find this limiting or too restrictive. In such cases, you can create separate AMP pages and tell Google to serve them when someone requests your pages on mobile devices.

Most news sites and high traffic blogs make use of AMP to load their web pages quickly. In fact, AMP is quite suitable for content heavy sites that are meant for reading.

Conclusion

Hopefully, the above tips will help you improve website loading speed in mobile. There is no single solution to improve your website speed. You will need to implement several of the above tips, if not all, to improve website performance. Instead of making all changes at one go, implement them one by one, and observe the speed improvement before moving on the next one. This will way you will be able to diagnose issues and rollback quickly.