Loading time of you website on mobile devices

Optimise the loading time on mobile devices and increase your conversions !

People generally concentrate on their websites' contents, and that is an excellent thing. Up to now, they didn't really worry about their pages' loading time. Thanks to fibre and high speed, it wasn't a subject anymore.

Today, one visitor out of two visit a website from a mobile device.

Moreover, we know the Internet user is the most impatient being on earth. It takes less than 3 seconds for him to decide if he wants to stay on a website or not. Add to this observation the fact a page on a mobile device can be loaded, depending on its weight, between one and twenty seconds.

So, the subject of loading time becomes of highest importance.

Loading time now officially belongs to the criteria Google will judge on your website. This criterion should gain more and more importance in the months to come.

Every second counts !

A recent survey led by gomez.com and akamai.com should motivate you to optimise your pages' loading time.

The equation is simple. The more your page is slow to be loaded, the more internet users, and therefore client potential, you lose.

Very concretely, if a company has a turnover of 11 308 $ (10 000€) per day, a delay of one second during a page's loading on its website could cost it 123 257,2 $ (109 000 €) every year.

How calculating your pages' loading times

Several tools exist to measure your pages' weights and loading times on your website. It is especially interesting to identify what has to be optimised to decrease the loading time.

In April 2015, Google created Page Speed. This tool scans the whole page and indicates, by priority order, the elements to optimise. To put it bluntly, 70 % of the recommendations are technical and demand the intervention of a developer.

This is an example of a result given by Page Speed : IMAGE.

Speed up your pages

Many elements can impact loading time of your pages. Google PageSpeed Insights will show you an exhaustive and precise list. Unforntunatly, most of theses elements will ask a developer's intervention. 

Here are the main elements that can easily improve your pages' loading times:

Optimize your images (beginner)

Each of your images must be optimized in order to load faster on you website.
Doing so, they must be :

• .jpg or .png file format,
• well dimensioned.

Indeed, it is not a rare thing to add a 2 000 pixels image to finally display it in a 200 pixels area. Google PageSpeed Insights will highlights every images that you can optimize.

JavaScript & CSS render blocking (experts)

In this case, Google advices you to prioritize the loading of the content that you want to first show to your users like the images and the texts before loading the further elements :

• static following,
• social networks,
• style (CSS).

Reduce server answering time (experts)

This is the speed which your server is able to send data to the user. Many factors so technical some that the others can be at the origin of this slowness :

• like application logic slow,
• database requests,
• routing services,
• not enough processing memory.

Think about browser caching (experts)

To explain the caching process, we have to explain how a web page is build. Generally, the website pages are dynamically generated every time a user ask for it. It allows to make sure that the website always has the last version of your contents.

The caching process, allows to avoid regenerating a web page in every call of a user. The principle is the following one: if page modified then regeneration, if page not modified, to show to the Internet user the already generated page. In this last situation the display of the page may be until 10 times faster because the server already has a version of page to be presented to the Internet user.