How to speed up your mobile site on WordPress (11 Performance Practices)

Mobile users are rising with each passing day. And with this, most businesses are coming online in search of an audience. Your mobile site is the most vital element that bridges the gap between your audience and you. But often, you may find that your website is slow when anyone tries to open it on a mobile.

Also, you may ask how to know if your website is slow. All these things throw light on mobile site optimization. If your mobile website is slow, it is necessary to speed up WordPress for mobile. To know more about it, follow this article below.

How to test the speed of your mobile page?

The very first thing that you need to do before even enhancing your mobile website’s speed is to evaluate its present performance. You will have to understand and assess your mobile website’s health and the speed that the mobile visitors experience.

If your website loads slowly, you may end up losing potential customers. So, prioritizing page loading speed is essential, especially when the world has become advanced.

To conduct an audit like that, you will need to make use of the best tools and technologies. You need to consider an option that offers easy insights into the performance of your site, both for mobile and desktop. You need to know that all the metrics possess separate thresholds between desktop and mobile.

To pick up the best tool to speed up WordPress for mobile, you need to choose the best tool. To do this, follow the given below criteria:

• Make sure that the tool can analyze and measure any page loading time.
• Ensure that the tool you consider offers you a mobile performance report.
• Make sure the tool can generate your web pages’ scores and provides actionable recommendations.
• Make sure that you can use the tool on multiple website devices.
• Ensure that the tool you have selected can help you identify the slow-loading pages on your site and fine-tune them quickly.
• Look for a user-friendly tool so that you can use it in different locations.

What is a fast mobile page load time?

As per reports, more than 75% of all mobile websites are slower than 10 seconds on a 3G network. And 19 seconds is considered to be the average website loading time on mobile while on a 3G network.

You must remember that nations such as China and India possess a heavy population. And most of the citizens of these nations make use of older Android mobile phones on a slow connection.

So, when you try to speed up WordPress for mobile for all these visitors, it will become blazing fast for other people as well.

If your website takes 3 seconds to load, it will have a performance grade of “D”. It means there are lots of things that you can for speeding up these sites.

The websites generally load slowly on mobile devices as they do not possess powerful computing ability. A website that takes 3 seconds to load on the desktop may take more than 10 seconds or more on your mobile device in a different nation.

Importance of speed:

Speed is something that matters today. For several years, Google has been counting speed as one of the best ranking factors. Also, website visitors demand it.

With time internet connections and devices are becoming better. Also, people are becoming more impatient with slow-loading websites. A lot of good options are out there.

So, it is easy for website visitors to click on a different website rather than waiting. A significant proportion of the popular abandons a site that takes over three seconds to load.

You will lose a lot of money from a slow-loading website. Even if you do not sell anything, you will lose subscribers and readers. When you speed up your website, it has a great impact on enhancing conversions and sales.

Why your WordPress website is slow on mobile devices?

Layouts are the main components of every website. The web browser determines the location and size of the components on your page. Without all of the themes, you are not going to have any way to organize the content or make appealing designs or layouts for your website users.

In case you possess tons of components for loading and weighty JavaScript, it is going to take some time for your web browser to figure out the dimensions and locations.

Also, 3rd-party scripts can result in your website’s low performance. Some of the popular 3rd-party scripts are visitor sessions, trackers, and external services like Instagram feed.

There can be tons of things wrong that can make your WordPress site slow on a mobile device. And it is necessary to speed up WordPress for mobile. Some of the most common reasons that can slow down your WordPress site on mobile are discussed below:

Mobile and desktop are different:

The mobile processors are crafted for efficiency, and performance is their 2nd priority. The mobiles possess a weak CPU architecture compared to desktops. It means when it comes to speed processing; mobile devices are not as powerful as desktops.

The speed is usually measured in Megabits (Mbps). More Mbps means more traffic can easily flow through a connection without any interruption. Mobile networks possess more network latency compared to desktops.

Unoptimized images:

In most cases, images are considered the main culprits behind the slowing down of your WordPress site.

Thus, you need to serve mobile-optimized images to speed up WordPress for mobile. To make the content readable on small screen sizes, you need to offer proportionally sized down and compact images.

Disabled mobile caching:

Most of the time, the websites are composed of data that is required to be loaded with videos and images. And therefore, sometimes, it may take a while for your website to load.

Caching makes all these components available automatically. It makes sure that you do not need to view the web page again in the future. It saves time for you on the mobile-devices or slower connections.

Animations, preloaders, or sliders:

A design or layout instability can hurt the user experience on mobile devices. Overusing animations and sliders can slow down all the pages. It will impact the conversion rates and SEO.

The tech giant Google is going to penalize your WordPress website if it possesses a poor Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) score in case of any sudden shift in layout. This particular Core Web Vital is going to harm your ultimate score of user experience and harm your traffic and SEO visibility.

Overstuffing of plugins:

When you install new plugins, it can harm your website’s page loading speed. Also, overstuffing plugins can lead to low performance and security breaches. The plugins can slow down your website by including DB queries and extra HTTP requests.

Some plugins need custom scripts or styling. It results in excess JavaScript files getting loaded onto the CSS files and page.

The ways to optimize a mobile site for speed:

In this article, we have come up with every possible technique for enhancing the mobile score of a website on Google. Some of the best performance optimization processes with easily applicable tips to speed up WordPress for mobile are given below:

1. Make use of a responsive WordPress theme:
It is essential to make use of a responsive WordPress theme as it makes your website look good on a tablet or mobile phone, regardless of the device you use for viewing it. You need to know if the page builder or the WordPress theme you have selected is responsive or not.

You may check the options or the customizer of your WordPress theme. Begin with building the pages and keep a note of the options provided by the page builder.

Elementor and Divi page builders possess this kind of responsive section. Make sure that the options you choose allow you to alter the margin, padding, and size for every device.

2. Enable the mobile caching option:
Mobile Caching is one of the most common strategies for reducing the load on the servers or on the app. For all these games and apps to seamlessly run at high speeds, there requires to be some kind of caching, also known as “stored local data”.

It makes sure that do not require any continuous download requests. The objective is to cut-off bandwidth usage, battery consumption, and network perceived lag.

Look for tools that allow you to implement a mobile cache in a single click.

3. Optimize every image for mobile:
Optimization of images for mobile is the process of creating and delivering top-notch images in a particular format that will improve user engagement on the phone.

You need to resize the images to save bandwidth. 640*320 pixels are commonly the standardized rule to follow. Also, you may maintain the “4:3 aspect ratio” for the images on the mobile.

It is essential to compress all the images to make your files smaller. It eventually speed up WordPress for mobile. You need to find the correct balance between the size and quality of images. You must never compromise quality. Also, you need to select the right file format. At present, WebP is one of the best image file formats.

You may make use of it on a desktop and on a mobile as well. It facilitates extremely lossy and lossless compression for the pages on the web. WebP facilitates 25% smaller file sizes than JPG and PNG having the same quality. Also, WebP loads quickly compared to JPG or PNG images because of the smaller file size.

You may compress and resize the images on-by-on or in bulk without sacrificing the quality.

4. Use lazy loading on the videos and images and serve different content to mobile visitors:
Another thing you can do on the videos and images is lazy loading.

A lazy loading script delays the image loading that cannot be viewed yet by the website visitors. A lot of plugins are available out there that allow you to implement lazy loading on videos and images.

What you need to do is display different content to the mobile users that load faster and possess an optimized design. To do this efficiently, include shortcodes to the WordPress site. Try to dequeue the unnecessary scripts or styles on the mobile.

Avoid serving huge graphical objects. Make use of mobile-specific functions. Also, you may separate the website. Precisely, when mobile users try to visit your website, he or they will be redirected to the mobile version of the website.

5. Optimize image delivery using a CDN:
If you want to speed up WordPress for mobile, you can optimize the image delivery. You might require different servers to enhance the rendered data’s speed anywhere across the world. This is exactly what a CDN excels at doing.

A lot of CDNs are available out there that allow you to optimize image delivery on mobile devices.

6. Enhance time to the first byte:
The target is to showcase something as soon as possible to all the visitors on mobile devices. It makes sure that they do not perceive the site as slow. It is all about offering a great first impression. You will require a fast-hosting provider that supports Gzip compression if possible.

Also, a cache plugin is necessary to cut off the processing time of the server. Look for a plugin that can clean the database, cache the web pages, activate Gzip compression, and others.

7. Remove the render-blocking components:
If PSI recommends you remove all the render-blocking resources, it means you must avoid loading every unnecessary resource at your website code’s top.

In case you have a lot of CSS and JS sitting uselessly, it is going to take longer for the web browsers to render your mobile website’s visible part.

The target is to offer critical CSS and JS and defer every non-critical style and JS. Also, you can remove all the unused code to save extra loading time. Precisely, you have to prioritize what the web browser is going to load at first.

A lot of plugins are available that allow you to load JavaScript deferred and eliminate useless CSS. You may delay JavaScript execution as well to speed up WordPress for mobile. In case you want to avoid using any plugin, make use of attributes and apply the tags all by yourself.

8. Cut off the weight of the web page:
A light page can load easily on a mobile device. A heavy or weighty page is going to load first as it consists of fonts, styles, scripts, images, and videos.

One of the most straightforward ways of reducing your page’s weight is by optimizing the images, implementing the GZIP, and minifying/combining the code. A lot of online tools are available that allow you to compress and minify the JS and CSS files in a couple of clicks.

9. Eliminate everything that challenges mobile devices:
It is necessary to avoid using any kind of pop-ups, preloaders, or animation for mobile visitors. In case you want all such components to load effortlessly, then you will eventually end up having an increased load time, page size, and a high number of HTTP requests.

You need to keep things simple and consider static images. Do not try to locally cache the data.

Also, the experience on the Google page depends on Intrusive Interstitials, mobile friendliness, and visual stability. In case you want your ranking to be at a good place, you must not make use of any unnecessary weighty components such as JS, properties, and layouts on mobile. This will speed up WordPress for mobile.

10. Get a full-age cache delivered via CDN:
Apart from making use of caching, you may make use of a Content Delivery Network or CDN service. A CDN means that a visitor is not too far from the servers, regardless of his or her location across the world.

For instance, if your web page takes less than two seconds to load in Paris, about four seconds in New York, and two seconds in Sydney, you may make use of a CDN. It makes sure that your webpage will load equally regardless of the place where the user is.

11. Manage the Ads correctly:
You must try not to display any kind of ads above the fold and then lazy-load them if they are far from the viewport. In short, you need to serve ads after some time and only when it is essential. Also, you need to make sure that the ads you facilitate are responsive.

Precisely, your ads need to be displayed on mobile having a 100% responsive CTA so that the users get the sense of interaction. You may make use of a plugin for controlling where and when to display the ads on the mobile.

Conclusion:
By now, you must have come through the ways to speed up WordPress for mobile and optimize the page loading time of your site. Indeed, a fast-loading page facilitates user convenience and satisfaction.

However, if you want to do something out of the box, you need to offer superior services, products, and content to your users. Make sure that whatever you offer solves a problem.