How to Increase Mobile Page Speed on Your WordPress ?
Google and other search engines majorly focus on mobile page speed more than the desktop version of a web page. If you are scoring less in the mobile tests, you have a chance to do mobile optimizations.
How to Test Mobile Page Speed?
Before taking any measures, you need to know how your site is having slow speed. There are lots of reasons why your site is slow, including hosting, caching, plugins, themes, and more.
Tools To Measure Mobile Page Speed
Why is your WordPress site slow on mobile?
A WordPress website can appear slow on mobile because of the causes listed below. You will notice that some of the causes are mobile-specific, while others are common causes that also apply to the desktop version of your site.
- Slow WordPress hosting
- Large images not optimized for mobile viewing
- Smartphone processors typically have weaker CPU architecture and are slower than desktops
- Mobile-specific CSS rules including viewport size, re-sizing images, etc.
- Too many heavy plugins simultaneously using too many resources
- Too many sliders, preloaders, or animations
Now that you have some idea of the causes, let’s proceed with steps to fix the issue and increase your site speed on mobile.
The Importance of Increase Mobile Page Speed
In 2018, Google announced that mobile page speed has become a factor in ranking; that is how important it is.
Other than that, if we analyze modern-day internet users, we have to consider their expectations regarding the websites they visit. Usually, users are least interested in the design behind the website. All they want is seamless navigation and web page load speed.
Time is money! – a common phrase we are all familiar with. Well, slow mobile web pages are a cost both website users and owners must bear. Both stakeholders are actually losing money for every second the site is taking to load.
Benefits of Having a Good Mobile Page Speed
0.1 s improvement in mobile page speed is enough to elevate every step in the buyer’s journey resulting in:
Enhanced User Experience
Faster loading times result in quicker access to content, reducing wait times and frustration. This improvement fosters positive interactions with the website, ultimately enhancing user satisfaction and engagement.
More Pageviews per Session
Improved mobile page speed encourages users to explore more content within a session. With quicker loading times, users are more likely to navigate through various sections or pages of the website, leading to increased pageviews per session as they find it easier to access desired information promptly.
Fewer Cart Abandonments
Quicker loading times in the checkout process minimize friction, ensuring a seamless and efficient transaction experience for users, resulting in uninterrupted progression and fewer abandoned carts.
Increased Conversion Rates and AOV
Faster-loading pages create a conducive environment for users to make purchase decisions swiftly and explore more products or services, resulting in higher conversion rates and potentially larger average order values. Ever since the Page Experience update and the Visibility index, pages that meet all of Google’s requirements are ranked 1 percentage point higher than the average. While slower domains will rank 3.7 percentage points lower than fast ones.
Lower Bounce and Exit Rates
Faster mobile page speed reduces bounce rates and exit rates as users find the website more engaging and responsive. With quicker access to content, users are less likely to leave the site immediately or exit prematurely, leading to improved user retention and engagement.
Optimized SEA Budget and Better Search Rankings
Faster-loading pages contribute to better ad performance, reducing bounce rates and improving user engagement, thereby optimizing ad spend. Additionally, improved mobile page speed aligns with search engine algorithms, potentially leading to better organic search rankings.
8 Ways To Increase Mobile Page Speed
8 Ways To Increase Mobile Page Speed with lots of strategies you can find out there. What works for desktop sometimes doesn’t work for mobile?
So, you might be looking for mobile-specific speed solutions to score better on fast internet connections as well as slower connections.
Here, we have picked the top 8 ways to increase mobile page speed and desktop.
- Switch to a fast hosting provider (if you’re not already using one
- Use the latest PHP version
- Optimize images
- Implement caching
- Optimize WordPress code (JavaScript, CSS, and HTML)
- Review and reduce plugins
- Improve Core Web Vitals
- Reduce Page Weight
1.Switch to a fast hosting provider (if you’re not already using one)
Web hosting is the foundation of any website. It offers the required facilities to handle and maintain a WordPress site. So, if you will leave your base weak, you’ll most likely drop in the entire process.
we recommend our clients use Bluehost & Hostinger for managed WordPress hosting services. Managed WordPress hosting by Bluehost comes with quality features to improve your performance and security in the long run.
2. Use the latest PHP version
PHP is one of the programming languages that WordPress is built on. The developers often release newer versions of PHP to make the software run faster and improve performance.
If your WordPress site is running on an older version of PHP, you might experience slow load times. You can check to see which version it’s using by navigating in your WordPress dashboard to Tools → Site Health → Info and selecting the Server tab.
WordPress recommends using version 7.4 or higher. At the time of writing, the latest version is 8.2.
It’s also important to note that many hosting providers will automatically update your site to the most recent PHP version. Some will even let you switch versions from your hosting account, which means it’s a quick way to possibly speed up WordPress.
3. Optimize images
Images are one of the top three things responsible for slowing your website down on mobile. They take up a lot of space on your server and it takes a while to download them on a browser.
That means optimizing your site’s images is another one of the best solutions for how to increase WordPress website speed in mobile devices.
Luckily there are a couple of things you can do to reduce the negative impact of images on your site.
- Use optimized image formats such as WebP or Avif whenever possible
- Reduce the image size before uploading them (learn about WordPress image sizes)
- Implement lazy loading so that images are downloaded on the browser only when they are needed
- Serve your images over CDN to reduce the load on your site server
- Use an optimization plugin to shave off a few kilobytes from your images
If you want to optimize all of this, you can use the Optimal plugin. Not only will Optimal compress, resize, and convert your images to the optimal format, but it can also dynamically serve optimized images via its CDN.
4. Implement caching
Using caching plugin can be a great way to improve your mobile page speed on WordPress. Caching is closely related to the speed of a site as it can reduce several seconds of your page load time.
One and the best way to get server caching of your site is by using managed WordPress hosting. However, in case, you don’t have that, you can use a fast-caching plugin to help you with the increasing speed of your site.
Site caching and server caching, both are different things. With caching server, your website stores web pages and other site content. By placing previously requested information in temporary storage, a cache server reduces bandwidth and page load time.
Cache Plugins also provide a feature of mobile caching. If most of your traffic comes from mobile, you can choose to preload mobile cache instead of desktop.
5. Optimize WordPress code (JavaScript, CSS, and HTML)
Just like having heavy image files can slow down your mobile load times, serving optimized code can also slow things down for your mobile visitors, especially if your site serves a lot of JavaScript.
This can make optimizing your site’s code another important step in how to increase WordPress website speed in mobile devices.
You can optimize your site’s code by performing the following steps:
- Minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to remove extra spaces, comments, and formatting
- Combine CSS and JavaScript files to ensure efficient HTTP requests (if your host uses HTTP/2, you can skip this, though)
- Implement Gzip or Brotli compression
- Eliminate render-blocking resources like CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files to force browsers to delay rendering content on your site
To minify, combine and compress files and codes, you need a minify plugin. Luckily, we recently wrote an in-depth guide on the best minify plugins after thoroughly testing them. To eliminate render blocking code, we have a separate tutorial.
6. Review & reduce heavy plugins
While there’s no hard rule on how many plugins your site can have, installing slow-loading and resource-heavy plugins will definitely have an effect on your site’s mobile load times.
Poorly coded plugins hog too many resources from your server leading to a slow loading speed. We recommend reviewing the plugin installed on your website and removing the ones that are poorly coded.
To weed the bad plugins out check reviews left by users in the WordPress plugin repository. Look at the reviews left in the last 12 months and seek the word “slow.”
If it appears in a significant number of reviews, it means that the plugin is to some degree responsible for slowing your site down. Find a better alternative to that plugin, and then remove it from your website.
Unfortunately, diagnosing slow-loading plugins is one of the more technical aspects of how to increase WordPress website speed in mobile.
For more technical users, though, you can also assess plugin performance using the waterfall analysis in a speed test tool and/or a free plugin like Query Monitor
7.Improve Core Web Vitals
By improving the health of your core web vitals – CLS, LCP, FID, you can improve mobile page speed on WordPress.
Open your mobile core web vitals report and check out the areas of improvement. If it is showing a bad score, then you need to make sure to improve your site core web vitals, and you’ll see a huge increment in the page loading and response time.
Moreover, FCP is another important factor that needs to be taken care of to speed your WordPress site. First contently paint doesn’t count in the core web vital but improving FCP will give you better site speed performance.
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