Have You Tested Your Google Mobile Page Speed Only to Find It’s Not Up to Par?

Well, You’ve just joined Tens of Thousands of website owners who want to boost their Google Mobile Page Speed, and You Can with These Tactics.

Google Mobile Page Speed

The only thing changing faster than mobile page speed is search itself! Thanks to constant Google updates and relentless Google announcements about ‘what’ you should be doing, more websites are being updated to keep up with search than ever before. It’s already started, but July 2018, Google will ‘officially’ make page speed a crucial ranking factor for mobile searches. Google’s very own “Speed Update” will impact websites that have the slowest web pages. Have you been planning to maximize the performance of your mobile site? If yes, then there’s no better time than now to your site is optimized for Google mobile page speed.

 

Website designers have been preparing for this update since last year. With the way Google has been indexing, crawling and ranking websites, it has become evident that the shift to mobile-first is a priority. So now, the much-awaited mobile-first index is here which means that search engines will crawl to your mobile sites first and then the desktop versions. The way your website appears in search results will now depend on these dynamics.

 

At present, Google is assessing websites based on their readiness to shift to mobile-first approach. It was in 2016 that mobile surpassed desktop website traffic. Hence, it’s surely not surprising that Google aims its search index to present in the best way possible to its leading user group. However, what is surprising is that there still exists a considerable number of websites that are not yet mobile friendly.

 

If you are planning to increase your Google mobile page speed, you will need to follow some useful tactics. Here are few smart strategies that you can implement.

 

 

1. Evaluate and reduce server response time

 

It is the web coding which decides the mobile page speed. However, it is also dependent on the server. If your server waits for a long time to reply to a request that comes from a browser, then your page has a sluggish loading time. Hence, it is essential that your server starts to transmit the initial byte of resources within a span of 200 milliseconds of a request sent.

 

Here you need to know about the “waiting time,” which refers to the time that passes before a response from a server. There are three crucial ways for maximizing your server response time:

  • Enhancing the web server software
  • Improving the scope and quality of web hosting solution and also making sure that there is ample CPU as well as memory resources
  • Minimizing the resources needed by the web pages

 

2. Reduce or avert the redirects to the accelerated mobile page speed

 

Simply put, redirects are usually instructions that take the web browsers from one web page to the other page. Every redirect, use up crucial milliseconds that leads to a slow page load. It is troublesome on the mobile equipment as they usually depend on networks with less reliability than the desktop users.

Redirects are a common practice in both web design and seo, but companies like Ethane Technologies trouble-shoot 301 redirect issues that slow down sites all the time stating that;

“Every single redirect you can remove (or clean up) will make your pages load faster.”

The 301’s are one of the standard types of page redirects. It helps to direct the online visitors from the old web pages to the ones that have been designed all anew, having several URL’s. 301’s tend to eat away a vast amount of mobile load time. Furthermore, the redirects are the reason why there are time wastes during the coding process. And this ultimately hurts the page speed.

 

3. Diligently measure the round-trip times

 

Simply put, RTT (Round trip time) is the time taken for a specific request for data to be transferred from a desktop or mobile device to a chosen destination which could be a remote computer as well. You can calculate RTT by pinging in an address. The precise interval here depends on various aspects such as connection medium, connection source and also the physical distance between the remote system and the actual source, the traffic amount, the total count of nodes between them and the total number of requests managed by a server.

Every RTT adds a particular section of time to the overall mobile load time. Therefore, it’s a smart call to minimize the number of subsequent roundtrips by ensuring that the resources get transferred in a parallel way, by eradicating the extra weight. Other than averting the above-discussed redirects, web developers advise blending scripts to avert repeated time-taking RTT. Mention below is a couple of files for this blending purpose:

  • External JavaScript
  • External CSS
  • Images using CSS sprites

 

4. Place the JavaScript below, CSS atop HTML files

 

With JavaScript, you will have interaction on your online web pages. For instance, this comprises of buttons and their data or responses entered in dynamic styling, animation, and forms. The JavaScript averts parallel downloads. Hence, when the JS code is loading, then the browser won’t get into any other downloads. To speed up the page load, you can shift the JS scripts beneath the web page when possible. It will enable HTML content to showcase before the JavaScript getting loaded which will further allow you to showcase a “page is loading” spinner.

 

CSS, also called the Cascading Style Sheets explain elaborately the way HTML elements should be showcased on a web design. The moment you keep your stylesheets at the starting of any document, you will find that your web pages have started to load quickly. When you place the CSS up front, the browser will showcase any amount of content that it has.

 

5. Load more than the-fold content prior below-the-fold content

 

It’s essential for your site to load a content that a mobile user would chance upon first than other content they see afterward. It is crucial that you code the web pages. It will enable your server to send the required data first to showcase content which is “above the fold.” A page could be incomplete, but the user will still witness the content as ready. Google in the speed tests for mobile pages flags those web pages that can’t load atop the fold first, suggesting that you ought to prioritize the visible content.

 

Today, most people use their Smartphone’s to browse through email and online websites. Hence, it has become all the more essential for established brands and start-ups, to ensure that their site is optimized for mobile first since this is going to have an impact on the search engine ranks as well. If you are looking for ways to maximize the speed of your mobile website, follow the above discussed essential strategies.