Improving the speed of your website on mobile
We have mentioned before about the recent announcements from Google stating that beginning in July 2018, regarding mobile searches, PageSpeed will become a major factor in where your page ranks in their search engine. So, to ensure your website isn’t affected negatively, we’ve put together some tips on improving your website page speeds and therefore improving your website performance.
Warning, this is a more technical article than usual so if you have any questions, let your web developer know and they should be able to help.
1. Measure and minimise server response time
Your mobile page speed is determined by your web coding and your server. It’s no secret that the longer your server takes to respond to a request from a browser, then the slower the page load time will be. Google suggest your server begins to transmit the first byte of resources of a request within a time frame of 200 milliseconds. There are different ways in which you can improve your server response time to meet this recommendation. This includes, improving your web server configuration or software, enhancing the scope and quality of your web hosting service, ensuring adequate memory resources and CPU, and finally, ensuring you reduce the resources required by your different web pages.
2. Minimise or avoid redirects to increase mobile page speed
A redirect is an instruction that automatically takes your users from one page to a different location. The problem is that redirects eat up valuable milliseconds, which results in a slower page load speed. This is particularly a problem on mobile devices as they tend to typically rely on a less reliable network than a desktop. With regards to redirects, Google has stated: “We strongly encourage webmasters to minimise the number and ideally eliminate redirects entirely”. Speak to your web company to ensure that any redundant or unnecessary redirects have been removed.
3. Optimise and minify code files
Excess page weight and more data will result in your website taking longer to load on average. That’s why it’s important to minimise and optimise your files. By minimising these elements, it eliminates irrelevant and redundant data without affecting the display of a page. There are lots of additional tools that can help you filter out your code and help remove any “dead-weight” which will, in turn, increase your page speed. If your website has been built on the WordPress platform, then we’d recommend using the W3 Total Cache plugin to achieve this.
Take action now to help improve your website page speeds to ensure you aren’t affected by the new changes being introduced by Google next month.