Why mobile web is slow

The latter, which is the default, blocks the rendering until the download finishes. The trade-off will be that for a short moment your page will look a bit ugly due to missing CSS assets. However, asynchronous will reduce loading times for slow mobile-connections. Google claims that it is always better to make assets asynchronous. Before making a request for fonts, the browser constructs a render tree to know what exact types of fonts are needed.

So, by default, font requests are made after the browser gets and parses more critical resources. However, text rendering is delayed without font information. To optimise web fonts, first consider minimising the number of used font types, then make sure that you import only variants that are actually needed. Secondly, there is no universal font file format for all browsers. Server-side rendering allows you to render the first page of your app and then serve it to the browser as a static page.

Not using server-side rendering can lead to two negative consequences. Firstly, it significantly affects your SEO. The page is rendered after the JavaScript initialization, which means that for a moment your site is empty for Google. Officially, Google is able to handle your JavaScripts. It might be a few hundred milliseconds or more than a second in a worst case scenario.

If you want to take advantage of the fact that the user has already visited your web app in the past, remember to properly configure the caching options in all your assets. It seems trivial but can substantially improve the loading speeds.

Lazy loading is a method of loading non-critical resources when they are needed, as opposed to getting all of the resources at the beginning. It is frequently used for images and videos that are originally off-screen and are loaded as soon as they become present in the viewport.

Because media resources are often heavy, this approach can significantly decrease the initial loading time. For a good user experience you can initially load lightweight placeholders for images and videos and replace them with the actual content when the user scrolls them into view. If you want to check if your web app is slow, you can easily do it here.

You should always aim at scoring at least 90 out of points to provide optimal user experience. Some plugins require custom styling or scripts, resulting in extra JS files being loaded onto the page and CSS files. Layouts are the key element of every website: the browser figures out the size and location of the elements on the page.

If you have a lot of elements to load and heavy JS, it will take a while for the browser to figure out the locations and dimensions. Another low-performance culprit is your dependency on 3rd party scripts such as trackers, visitor sessions, external services — such as Instagram feed.

Do you recognize your mobile website as one of those issues? We have listed all the techniques to improve your mobile score on Google PageSpeed Insights. Mobile caching is a common technique to reduce the load on an application and its servers.

The goal is to reduce bandwidth usage, network perceived lag, and even battery consumption. Image optimization for mobile is the process of creating and delivering high-quality images in a format that will increase user engagement on their phone. We recommend you follow the following techniques to make sure your images are well optimized on mobile:. The main features include all the best practices we just listed:. Feel free to check it out.

The last key of image optimization is to lazy load your images and videos on mobile. The lazy loading script delays the loading of an image that is not being viewed by the visitors yet. The lazy load feature is already included:. Optimizing image delivery is a key step in improving mobile page speed.

You may need multiple servers to increase the speed of your rendered data anywhere in the world. This is exactly what a CDN is doing. You need to have a fast hosting provider supporting Gzip compression if possible and a cache plugin to reduce the server processing time. A plugin like WP Rocket can help you clean your database, activate Gzip compression, cache your pages, and much more. If you have a lot of useless JS and CSS there, it will take longer for browsers to render the visible part of your mobile site.

You can also remove the unused code to save some extra loading time. In other words, you need to prioritize what the browser will load first. You can also delay JS execution, which is often one of the main culprits for a slow mobile site:. A lighter page will be quicker to load on mobile. A heavy page will generally be caused by videos, images, scripts, styles, and fonts.

Avoid using any sliders , animation, preloaders, or pop-ups for your mobile visitors. Keep it simple and opt for static images instead by trying to cache data locally. As we explained earlier, a CDN means that a visitor is never too far from your servers, no matter where he is in the world. Imagine that your page takes 1 second to load in Paris, 2 seconds in New York, and 4 seconds in Sydney.

If you use a CDN, the page should load equally no matter where the mobile user is. Try to never display any ads above the fold and lazy-load them until they reach the viewport. You should also build responsive ads to display them well on mobile with a responsive C-T-A, so users feel like interacting.

Before we start, we recommend you read our detailed guide about how to test WordPress site performance. An advanced test site built with Astra with many images, a YouTube video, and an Instagram feed. All of them are linked to mobile optimization :. My website is doing much better with WP Rocket. As for the issues previously flagged by Google, WP Rocket resolved most of them. Bookmark the permalink. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed. Internet Presence Management for Small Business Owners Full-service, pay-as-you-go all inclusive websites, from design and content to SEO and social media management for one low monthly price.

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