A report released by one of the research-based firm, statista, says an estimated 62.9 percent of the population worldwide already owned a mobile phone, the figure will continue to increase, so how do you optimize and increase the mobile speed of your website?
In an effort to improve the user experience of mobile users, Google launched a project aimed at assisting webmasters to better engage their site visitors with testmysitewithgoogle.
“Most of the mobile market growth can be attributed to the increasing popularity of smartphones. By 2014, around 38 percent of all mobile users were smartphone users. By 2018, this number is expected to reach over 50 percent. The number of smartphone users worldwide is expected to grow by one billion in a time span of five years, which means the number of smartphone users in the world is expected to reach 2.7 billion by 2019,” statista report says.
So how do you test the loading speed of your site?
Step 1: Visit test my site with Google at https://testmysite.withgoogle.com/intl/en-gb
Step 2: Enter your site url and hit test
Step 3: Your site would be tested using 3G since it’s still the commonest internet speed used worldwide
Step 4: If you like to get the full report and how to implement some of the tips, enter your e-mail address
Your site would be tested based on the following criteria: Loading time, Estimated visitor loss, Reduce server response time, Leverage caching, Optimise images, and Try Accelerated Mobile Pages.
According to Google, loading time, “is is Speed Index, how long the visible content of your page takes to appear using Chrome on a Moto G4 device within a 3G network. Loading time can vary based on server location, device, browser and third-party apps. If your site contains carousels, overlays or interstitials, this may impact your loading time results. To perform a website speed test using different settings, visit webpagetest.org.”
Estimated visitor loss, “is the probability of a user leaving this web page as a result of waiting for more than three seconds for it to load.”
Reduce server response time “measures how long it takes to load the necessary HTML to begin rendering the page from your server. Reduce your server response time to under 200ms.”
Leverage caching, “allows a browser to store frequently requested files on the user’s device for a set period of time. When caching is enabled, subsequent page loads can be more efficient.”
Google advises that Optimise images have to do with size of photo in a page, suggesting that photos should be compressed and formatted properly.
While Accelerated Mobile Pages “lets you create web pages that load near instantaneously. Create AMP versions of your landing pages to help improve your mobile user experience.”
Don’t be surprised that this website will also need to implement some of the Google test my site tips to improve its loading speed.