47% of users expect websites to load in two seconds or less, while 40% will leave the page if it takes three or more seconds to load.
With the rapid growth of mobile users,it is important to optimize your mobile page speed to meet your user’s expectations and boost its chances to rank high for search engines.
In this article we’ll look into:
- Why mobile page speed matters
- How to diagnose your site’s page speed and find out where to apply fixes
- Five tips on how to speed up a mobile site
- Accelerated Mobile Pages by Google and how it works
Table of Contents
Why Is Mobile Page Speed Important?
79% of mobile users said they would not return to a site that had performed poorly during their last visit.
Having a fast-loading mobile site is, therefore, increasingly important for businesses as users’ expectations are growing.
Let’s look at the three most vital factors mobile page speed affects:
- It’s a big ranking factor for search: Page loading speed is one of the critical ranking factors for search engines. In December 2017, Google started ranking all search results based on the mobile version of their pages. Numerous research, such as Backlinko’s, has shown that good loading speed contributes hugely to the ranking in the top 10 Google search results. In fact, all the websites in the first ten results were designed and optimized for speed, so if you want your site to rank, make sure your web development agency provides loading ‘receipts’.
- It affects the bounce rate: The faster the site loads, the lower its bounce rate will be. This was supported by another research that showed that the probability of bounce increases by 23% as page load time goes from 1s to 3s, or 90% if it goes from 1s to 5s proving the correlation between fast websites and low bounce rates.
- It impacts conversion rates: A one-second delay in mobile load times can negatively impact conversion rates by up to 20%. If a website takes longer than three seconds to load, your business loses 40% of your visitors before they even arrive on your site which is a big blow for conversions. Furthermore, 52% of online shoppers have said that quick page loading is important to their site loyalty.
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How To Run a Mobile Site Speed Test And Diagnose Issues
Just as slow mobile experience drives potential customers away, a fast mobile experience can attract and retain them.
It is often difficult to diagnose and establish what is causing your site’s loading issues.
Identifying the cause helps site administrators and developers focus on the root of the problem to eventually figure out what to do to improve the site speed.
To analyze your website’s loading behavior, you can use the below tools that provide comprehensive reports about its current state, possible optimization solutions and general suggestions on what you should do to make your site faster.
Page Speed Insights
Page Speed Insights is a tool that helps with making necessary speed optimization of your mobile website.
Using it is fairly simple:
- Open the Page Speed Insights and enter your URL into the bar
- Click “Analyze” and Google will run the speed test of your site
- It will generate a report that highlights the elements that could be hindering your site’s speed
When you work on improving some of the items from the report, the “Possible Optimizations” list will shrink and will show the level of impactfulness of the remaining unoptimized elements.
It is advisable to start working on the Top Priority items first, before moving on to the rest.
GTmetrix
GTmetrix allows users to run analysis right from their website’s dashboard, as a plugin, although it also operates as a standalone website tool.
With this page speed measuring tool, you can:
- Schedule site speed reports on a daily, weekly and monthly basis
- Receive alerts about the status of your site
- Learn how much size you can reduce for each element
- Preview the optimized version of images and other website elements
GTmetrix’s report lets users know exactly what parts of their site need to be optimized and provides info on total page size and load time.
It separates its alerts into priority tabs, so you know exactly which to prioritize.

How To Speed Up A Mobile Site In 5 Steps
Once you have identified your site’s weak points, you can get around to addressing them.
The five steps that follow encompass the most common issues encountered in mobile page speed optimization.
1. Create A Lightweight Mobile Design
You should aim for improving mobile page speed directly, not just the loading speed of your desktop website and hope it will affect the mobile version.
To create a lightweight mobile design, try to follow all of these steps:
- Embrace minimalism: Try to keep your website interesting and engaging as possible without cluttering the website and overdoing and overcomplicating things in terms of design.
- Create simple but effective navigation: Navigation that is stripped down to its bare minimum improves user experience and doesn’t overload the site’s database, making it faster
- Reuse assets: A consistent library of designed assets across all screens, devices and resolutions can be reused throughout the website, reducing the number of calls to servers needed to download or show them to the user.
- Use white space and a single column layout: This arrangement not only provides better readability and enhances the user experience, but the absence of concrete elements and streamlined layout helps with faster website loading.

2. Optimize Every Website Element
When looking to improve mobile site speed, you should strive to optimize every element that comprises your site pages. This includes optimizing:
- Images:
- Compress pictures and photos
- Replace animated GIFs with videos
- Serve responsive images with correct dimensions
- Use WebP images
- Use image CDNs
- Fonts:
- Avoid invisible text during font loading
- Use one to two simple fonts
- CSS:
- Minify CSS
- Extract critical CSS
- Optimize background images with media queries
- Defer non-critical CSS
- Java Script:
- Apply instant loading
- Remove unused code
- Compress network payloads
- Use up-to-date code for modern browsers
You should also consider:
- Minimizing of the number of HTTPS requests
- Using CDN for static resources
- Using lazy loading, which is loading images and other elements only when a user scrolls down to where they are supposed to show up
3. Use Browser Caching
Browser caching is a mobile site speed optimization method that can provide a big impact.
When your site is loading, it fetches the resources like loading every page element before taking on HTML5 and entire coding infrastructure.
This is a lot of effort that takes plenty of time – and it happens every time when someone is landing on your website.
Browser caching remembers the resources that were already loaded so they don’t have to reload again. When a visitor lands on your website the next time, elements like images, videos and logos will not need load again.
There are plugins that can help you achieve this without too much coding, such as:
- W3 Total Cache
- Hummingbird
- HyperCache
- LiteSpeed Cache
4. Minimize Your Website’s HTML
A big contributor to mobile site speed and getting green flags from Google is minimizing the space your site’s HTML code takes.
By minifying the code script of your website, you can increase the speed of your mobile site greatly.
Through HTML minification, you are essentially removing or fixing unnecessary or duplicate data without impacting the browser’s processing of HTML.
Minifying HTML means:
- Fixing the code
- Formatting the code
- Removing unused bits of code
- Shortening code when possible
There are useful plugins that can assist with this, such as:
- HTML Minify
- Autoptimize
- Fast Velocity Minify
- Merge+Minify+Refresh
5. Build A Website Performance Culture
Optimizing websites for speed should not be a one-off task – it should become a part of your business culture.
Website performance should be both a goal and a strategy to boost discoverability, acquisition and conversion rates. It should also be a part of your brand reputation tactics.
Coming up with a site performance budget and establishing and fostering a performance culture in which all employees within a company are on the same page regarding site speed should be part of your wider optimization strategy.
Everyone you work with should recognize mobile speed as the website’s core feature.
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What Is Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) And How Does It Increase Mobile Page Speed?
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is a Google-supported project that was first announced in October 2015, before it appeared in Google search results in September the following year.
In December 2015, Google hinted that AMP may become a ranking factor.
By 2017, 1 million websites had already used AMP, which climbed to 50 million in 2019.
This open-source technology is optimized for mobile web browsing and its aim is to make webpages load faster. AMP web pages can be cashed by Google’s CDN servers which serves the pages much quicker to users.
As a result, the website loads instantly because it uses Google servers’ cache.
The AMP code makes pages load faster when a user clicks on them in Google’s search results. Pages that utilize AMP rank better and perform faster, leading to higher lead retention and conversion rates.
The benefits of using AMP on your mobile site and the consequence of improved speed include:
- Increase in organic traffic
- Increase in SERP impressions
- High SERP CTRs
Because Google leads this project, all the relevant technological advancements they come up with can be implemented into it, which further assists websites using AMP.
However, there are certain disadvantages of AMP that we also need to consider:
- It imposes very strict CSS and JavaScript limitations on websites
- AMP can be implemented on websites only using a limited variety of AMP modules and not all will be suitable for certain websites
- As a result of these restrictions, websites using AMP have less individuality
- User experience on an existing desktop website differs from the AMP website

Takeaways On How To Speed Up A Mobile Site
It is critical that businesses and marketers design and develop fast mobile site experiences, no matter the industry sector they’re in.
As over half of all overall internet traffic now comes from mobile, optimizing mobile websites for speed means more chances at successful lead generation and conversion.
Marketers must keep people engaged on mobile and can do so by:
- Using the right tools that point out site weaknesses affecting site speed
- Understanding that mobile site speed affects search engine ranking, conversion rates and bounce rates
- Using this understanding to take the right steps, as listed in this article, to reduce their page load times
Request A Quote For Your Mobile Site Project
Tell us about your goals and let our experts give you recommendations and a custom proposal.
There are plugins that can help you achieve this without too much coding, such as:
W3 Total Cache
Hummingbird
HyperCache
LiteSpeed Cache",
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Categories (tags):
FAQs
How can you increase the speed of site on mobile devices? ›
Compression helps increase page speed by saving bandwidth. Gzip compression is one way to compress files, and it can be set up on most servers, but other options are available. You can also run most code through a minification process, which reduces the size of the final transfer file.
What is ideal mobile speed for website? ›When it comes to mobile website speed, we recommend a load time of 5 seconds or less on mobile devices with 3G connections. It might sound like a lofty goal, but there's a lot to gain by improving website speed. Even a 1 second improvement could increase conversions.
What is a fast speed for a website? ›if your site loads in 2.9 seconds, it is faster than approximately 50% of the web. if your site loads in 1.7 seconds, it is faster than approximately 75% of the web. if your site loads in 0.8 seconds, it is faster than approximately 94% of the web.
How do I fix a slow website speed? ›- Clean up your website's code. Remove unnecessary elements such as white spaces, comments and inline spacing.
- Check your PHP version. ...
- MySQL Server: Find slow-executing queries. ...
- Analyze slow website content. ...
- Speed up your site performance. ...
- Check your content.
Why Mobile Speed Matters in SEO. Your mobile site's load speed has a significant effect on your site visitors' experience, and you can't optimize your desktop site speed and call it a day. If your mobile site is taking more than 3 seconds to load, you need to do something about it.
Why is mobile page speed important? ›The page speed of a mobile website plays a vital role in delivering a positive user experience for mobile users. According to research by Statista, mobile web traffic contributes 52.3% of global web traffic. That's more than half of global web traffic, and the numbers are still predicted to grow.
Why is mobile page speed important for SEO? ›Why is page speed important? Page speed is probably the purest of SEO factors, because addressing loading times improves your rankings, your user experience and your conversion rate too. It's a rare example of an SEO measure that is a win for absolutely everyone!
Why is my WordPress site slow on mobile? ›A common reason for WordPress sites being slow is because of the size of all the elements that make up the site. Oversized images, for example, take longer to load. So it's important that you keep your images as small as possible.
What is the 3 second rule website? ›A good rule of thumb for a website is the 3-30-3 rule. You have three seconds to make a first impression. If they stay for three seconds, you have thirty seconds to give them what they came to the site for.
What affects website speed? ›The amount of resources a website needs to load makes a huge impact on site performance. Large JavaScript files, video content, heavy CSS files, and high-definition images all add significant 'weight', or load time, to a webpage.
What are 5 ways to improve website traffic? ›
- Optimize your content with keywords. ...
- Create targeted landing pages. ...
- Craft engaging, high-quality content. ...
- Use digital ads to promote your site. ...
- Boost your local search reputation. ...
- Send emails that link to your website.
- Understand your users. Understanding your users' wants and needs can be the first step toward improving your website. ...
- Plan intentionally. ...
- Stay organized. ...
- Be consistent. ...
- Use responsive design. ...
- Test frequently. ...
- Speed up your page. ...
- Generate high-quality content.
- What Do I Do About My Website Loading Slowly? If one thing is true about your website, it's that loading speed matters. ...
- Enable Caching. ...
- Remove Resource-Hogging Plugins and Add-ons. ...
- Optimize and Reduce the Size of Your Images. ...
- Minimize Your Code. ...
- Use a CDN.
There are numerous speed testing services and apps, these are the most popular ones. Ookla Speedtest (www.speedtest.net) - The most widely used speed testing service. App versions are also available for Windows and Mac. Ookla Speedtest App (www.speedtest.net/mobile/) - For iPhone, iPad, Android, and Windows phones.
What is the optimization of mobile? ›Mobile optimization refers to the strategic approach of updating your website to deliver an ideal and engaging experience to users who are visiting the site from their mobile device. Truly optimized content offers amazing experiences across channels – including both desktop and mobile devices.
What is a good mobile page load time? ›What is a good page load time? According to a 2019 study by Portent, a 0-4 second load time is best for conversion rates, and the first five seconds of page-load time have the highest impact on conversion rates. In fact, the highest ecommerce conversion rates occur on pages with load times between 0-2 seconds.
What is speed optimization? ›What is page speed optimization? Page speed optimization means improving the loading time of web pages. This is done by serving less files, and making sure the files are as light as possible, without cutting into the quality or functionality of a web page's web design.
Why improve page speed? ›Page speed is important to users because, well, faster pages are more efficient and provide a much better on-page user experience. Per a recent Kissmetrics infographic, if a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load, over a quarter of users will click away and choose a different search result.
What is Page Speed Booster? ›Page Speed Booster tells your browser to use idle time to retrieve or prepare to retrieve page contents in anticipation of the user's next action. As a result, Page Speed Booster helps to make your site's pages instant and improves your Conversion Rate.
What is a good page speed for SEO? ›Keep in mind that the ideal site speed is three seconds or less. The results will also provide some ways to improve your mobile page speed SEO and industry comparisons to see how your site stacks up against the competition.
Does mobile Page Speed affect SEO? ›
The simple answer is that page speed does affect SEO. Page speed is a direct ranking factor, a fact known even better since Google's Algorithm Speed Update. However, speed can also affect rankings indirectly, by increasing the bounce rate and reducing dwell time.
How can I bypass mobile data speed limit? ›If you can't change your ISP, your next best option is to use a VPN. The Tor browser can also help you get around ISP throttling, but it's super slow, which defeats the purpose. This leaves the VPN as the surefire way to easily bypass bandwidth throttling without putting further strain on your connection.
Does changing APN increase speed? ›Yes, changing the APN does not affect your phone or SIM settings in any way. The only thing it does affect is your mobile data speed and that too for good.
What app can help you type faster? ›- Keybr. What It Is: Older kids have a way to improve their speed and accuracy in typing. ...
- Keyblaze. ...
- Learn Typing. ...
- tapping. ...
- Type Racer. ...
- Typesy. ...
- Typing.com. ...
- TypingClub.
Type Fu helps you perfecting the skill of touch typing by visualizing your progress. You will be able to easily tell from the pretty charts exactly how much better your typing speed and accuracy become, and which keys you miss most.
How do I speed up my WordPress site in 5 steps? ›- Run performance tests.
- Choose a reliable hosting provider.
- Update everything.
- Use the latest version of PHP.
- Delete unused plugins.
- Install high-quality plugins only.
- Use a lightweight theme.
- Optimize images.
- Restart your phone.
- Check your data usage limit.
- Move to a new location.
- Check if you are using a VPN.
- Reset your network settings.
- Find data-draining apps.
- Clear your cache on browsers.
- Update your phone's software.
- Mobile Usability report in Google Search Console.
- Text too small to read.
- Clickable elements too close together.
- Content wider than screen.
- Viewport not set [to “device-width”]
- Uses incompatible plugins.
- Validate fix in Search Console.
- Conclusion.
- Mobile Usability report in Google Search Console.
- Text too small to read.
- Clickable elements too close together.
- Content wider than screen.
- Viewport not set [to “device-width”]
- Uses incompatible plugins.
- Validate fix in Search Console.
- Conclusion.
- Click on Pages in the main admin menu.
- Go with your mouse on the page you want to modify for the mobile version and click on the action link “Create mobile version”, or click on the icon “+” you see in the devices column.
- Modify your page as you want to see it on mobile.
- Save your page mobile version.
How do I make my WordPress site mobile responsive? ›
- Understand why responsive web design is important.
- Take the Google Mobile-Friendly Test.
- Use a responsive WordPress theme (or create your own)
- Consider mobile-friendly WordPress plugins.
- Use mobile-friendly opt-ins.
- Think in terms of responsive media.
The number one reason why your website might be failing to work on a mobile device is that it is simply not mobile responsive. This means the website doesn't proportionally resize to different size screens.
How do I manage my WordPress site on mobile? ›- WordPress.com Apps. WordPress.com offers apps that connect to your self-hosted WordPress site. ...
- WooCommerce. ...
- Google Analytics. ...
- Evernote. ...
- Pingdom. ...
- Buffer. ...
- IFTTT. ...
- Feedly.
- From any Elementor page or post editor, click the hamburger menu in the upper left corner of the Widget Panel, then navigate to Site Settings > Layout > Breakpoints, and set the breakpoint value for mobile and tablet.
- Save your changes.
WordPress for Android
You can use the mobile app to create, edit, and publish posts, manage your media, delete or approve comments, and track your site's traffic and trends. Later versions of the plugin also include the ability to customize your Theme and Menu settings.