Faster Mobile Websites, Happier Users: How to Optimize Load Times

Mobile Website Loading Time

Mobile users have a shorter attention span and less patience compared to desktop users, so it’s important to ensure that your mobile website loads quickly. This means optimizing your images, minimizing the use of large files, and minimizing HTTP requests.

Minimize HTTP requests
Each element on a webpage (images, scripts, stylesheets, etc.) requires an HTTP request to load, which can slow down load times. To minimize HTTP requests, minimize the number of elements on your page and combine multiple stylesheets and scripts into a single file.

If the script and stylesheet are small and short, you may consider to embed them into the html without loading the files explicitly.

Optimize images
Images are often the largest files on a webpage and can significantly slow down load times. To ensure that your website loads quickly on mobile devices, it’s essential to optimize your images.
Compress images to reduce their file size without sacrificing quality. Use the appropriate image format (WEBP, JPEG, PNG, etc.) for the type of image you’re using.

WebP is a modern image format and is designed to provide superior image quality while using smaller file sizes than other image formats, such as JPEG and PNG. WebP images can be up to 30% smaller than JPEG images and up to 80% smaller than PNG images, which can significantly improve load times for web pages, especially on mobile devices.

JPG to WEBP Converter
https://cloudconvert.com/jpg-to-webp

Lazy loading is a technique that delays the loading of images until the user scrolls down to the part of the page where the image is located. This can help improve load times by reducing the amount of data that needs to be downloaded initially.

Minimize code
Clean and optimized code can help improve load times by reducing the amount of data that needs to be downloaded. Minimize code by removing unnecessary whitespace, comments, and code that isn’t being used.

Minification tools can help reduce the size of your JavaScript and CSS files by removing unnecessary characters and whitespace.

Minify – JavaScript and CSS minifier
https://www.minifier.org/

Use caching
Caching can help reduce load times by storing frequently accessed files in a user’s browser cache. This means that when a user revisits your site, some files will already be downloaded and won’t need to be downloaded again. Use caching to store static files (such as images, scripts, and stylesheets) and consider using a content delivery network (CDN) to store files on multiple servers around the world.

On server side, try to cache HTML code snippets instead of loading from server or database. For example, if the product category is small and fixed, the category can be hard coded into the HTML code instead of fetching it from database. This can help to maker fewer requests to database and improve load times.

Use a content delivery network (CDN)
A CDN can help improve load times by distributing files across multiple servers around the world. When a user requests a file, the CDN will serve the file from the server that is closest to the user, reducing latency and improving load times.

One of the approach is to put images on a CDN to improve website performance. You can take advantage of the network’s distributed servers to serve images from the server that is geographically closest to the user. This can significantly reduce latency and improve load times for mobile users.

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