Mcommerce is the leading way that people shop for things. If your company wants to take advantage of this, your website will have to meet users’ performance expectations. This means that your pages must load quickly and your site should work smoothly on a mobile device. You can do this by prioritizing site speed using a mobile-first design.
Simpler Designs Load Faster
The speed of your website is largely determined by what it is comprised of. One way that you can speed up your website without a lot of detailed code expertise is to simplify the overall mobile-first design of the website. Simpler web designs. Less code to get through and fewer elements to render onscreen. By reducing the complexity of their website, and decreasing the load on the mobile devices’ processor making it easier to render the website quickly instead of focusing on a lot of code.
From a mobile standpoint, you want your website to be as simple as possible and designed to work well on mobile device screens. This means eliminating elements that are unnecessary so that you can focus on the elements that are needed to make your website function. This also creates more screen space for the elements that are there, giving you the option to change the size and shape of elements to make them more accessible on a mobile device.
Optimize Images
Images are an important part of any site, whether they are pictures, icons, or artwork. Because they are so integral to how your website looks and functions, removing them may not be an option. However, you can optimize images for mobile devices so that they take up less space and are less resource-intensive to send to mobile devices. Images contain a lot of digital information and can be among the highest resource costs when trying to serve a website to a device. Reducing the size of an image can significantly hurt the quality of that image once it is rendered. You can, however, take steps to reduce the burden on the mobile device when you optimize images.
There are two ways you can optimize your images. The first is to choose the right size and resolution for mobile devices. Often, mobile devices do not need to receive their full resolution. There may not enough pixels on the screen to render that image at full size. Instead, choose a smaller resolution that is more appropriate for phones. That way, the mobile device will have received less information to compile the picture much faster.
The other way to optimize your picture is to use an optimization tool when uploading it to your website. Optimization tools usually find a way to compress the image so that it fits into a smaller file format. Reducing the size of its file means that less information has to go to the mobile device to generate the same quality picture. There are many image optimizers available on the Internet, with many good at high-quality options available.
Choose Fonts Effectively
The fonts that you use on your website can impact performance as well. If a font is not previously installed on a device, it has to collect the data from the website or from another source before using it. This can add loading time to your webpages or force the device to load a different font that may not work well with your style choices.
To avoid this problem and improve performance, choose fonts that are common on mobile devices. That way, it won't have to load an outside resource to use the font that you chose. It can also reduce loading time significantly for each page where the font is used, creating a speed boost for your entire website. There are many font choices that you can rely on and each manufacturer or OS company lists the fonts that it uses online. Many of those fonts have universal equivalents so that they will work with any company’s technology.
Tap into Device Features
If you want to get the most performance of your website, look into using the features that are present on mobile devices. Many devices have specialized features built in to reduce the amount of data used by the device. This could involve image caching, prefetching, predictive loading, or a variety of other features. You can use APIs to access these features and put them to use to try to minimize the impact of your website on the mobile device and speed up its overall performance.
Get Help with Your Page Speed
Taking into account all of the ways of improving page speed, there is little reason for you to avoid updating your website to match. Mobile-first design makes it easier to build a website that functions at the level that viewers expect. At KitelyTech, our team is ready to help you start your next project focusing on speed and mobile-first design. Call us at (800) 274 2908 to discuss your next project.
