Even with the explosion of mobile internet and searches, roughly only half of small to medium sized businesses have a mobile-ready website. In the event that you do have a mobile friendly website, you are not only ahead of the pack, but only have to compete with around half of you competitors – good news in an oversaturated market place.
Google has stated that over 50 percent of global search is conducted via mobile, and many people exclusively use their mobile for local searches and information. Furthermore, Google has also reported that 40 percent of consumers will go to a competitors site in the event they are dealing with a site that has a poor mobile experience.
Here are a few tips to maintain a great mobile experience, and most importantly, keep your mobile site working as fast as possible.
1. Need for Speed
With the increase of mobile internet use, customers are increasingly interested in speed and times of the pages they are loading. If your site takes more than 3 seconds to load, about 40 percent of users will end up abandoning your site.
In this case, literally seconds can be the difference between attaining a new client and new conversions, or having a user abandon your site and go to the competition.
2. Google Ranks for Speed
To add to the previous section, speed is very important! Google has even stated that it favours faster sites, and this can improve or decrease your site ranking.
Local mobile search depends on speed.
3. Content Is Actually Slowing Us Down
Even though the internet and technology is constantly improving, mobile experiences are often slowing down, not speeding up. Due to the increase of pictures, videos, graphics and videos, all this extra data is resulting in longer times.
Having a good balance of an up-to-date mobile site along with not overloading it too much content might be a good idea to speed up leading times and mobile friendliness.
4. Faster Mobile Page Formats
Google announced Accelerated Mobile Packages (AMP), which is an open-source framework that assists in making pages lighter-weight by having the cache on the Google server.
With such things as Facebook constantly changing their content, Google is taking steps to also improve speed and introducing new things such as AMP.
5. Fonts & Videos
Little things like ensuring your fonts are optimized for page loading is important. Some fonts can actually be bigger than you think – play around and see which ones can improve your speed versus others. Also, try utilizing a compression tool when dealing with videos to lighten the amount of data your site has to initially load. While they can be great, videos can slow your speed and loading times down.
