July 1, 2015

Speed up your mobile friendly website

July 1, 2015

Speed up your mobile friendly website

Speed up your mobile friendly website

So we all know that fast websites are a good thing in general for user experience, however they are especially good for mobile users. While mobile technology has come on leaps and bounds the past few years, there are still many devices that are not as quick as some of the latest technology.

Good website speed = Good user experience

What this means is your websites need to be optimised for mobile devices where possible. Why? Simply because every website visitor is a potential customer and if your website is taking 'forever' downloading unoptimised high-res images, you are most likely going to lose that customer. As a small business owner, you don't want to provide them with more reasons to not buy your products or services.We are going to address a few top level best practises for working with your mobile website offering whether it is a dedicated mobile website or a responsive website (auto adjusts to screen sizes).

Images

A big factor for mobile website speed issues and general usability is the image sizes. If these images are not optimised to be compressed down for mobile devices, then the website can often take minutes to be loaded, which of course, will result in the visitor abandoning their visit to your website or elsewhere.The big question, do those images even need to be displayed on mobile? While they might look awesome on a big desktop screen, truth is on a small device, they might be completely wasted. So if this is the case then the smart website owner would look to lose the image altogether for their mobile website offering. This can be done easily for both a dedicated mobile website and a mobile responsive website through a skilled web developer.If you are set to have all your images live, then there is a smart way to optimise these images to keep your mobile speed positive. When it comes to this, again you really need a professional web design agency on the case as it comes down to the CSS Media Queries and background-image style on a DIV to achieve the same effect (complicated website coding work).

Cache

Caching is a superb way to utilise the fact that often some key elements of your website do not change such as images or CSS. What does this do? It simply means that your website visitors only download it one time, on their first visit. Then when they return, the website is already mostly downloaded and the speed is improved tenfold. If you're using a CMS like WordPress then a cache plugin can be simply downloaded and put to work.

HTTP/2

Most website operate on HTTP/1.1, however this is over 10 years old and so there is a definite shift to more browsers and servers supporting the more up to date HTTP/2. Fundamentally this is the future of website design and so any new website development projects that you might be considering, should be on your development map.As always if you are interested in speaking with the uber talented team of web developers here at Bang Digital, then get in touch!