Need for Speed #Mobile: Importance of Speed and Responsive Mobile pages

Editor's Notes

• #2: Hi everyone, as Robert mentioned I’ll be covering why having a fast mobile website is important to your business, the problems you may encounter from a slow loading site and some tips to help improve your site speed.
• #3: We all know mobile is important these days but have you considered how long your site takes to load for mobile users, your customers could be left waiting around and a large percentage of visitors to your site could be leaving. If your website isn’t mobile responsive you may have an even bigger problem for a number of reasons which we’ll run through.
• #4: So we know mobile is important, looking at the latest stats from Stat Counter we can see mobile traffic has grown 10% in the past year in the UK, whilst desktop usage has dropped 10% over the same period.This highights the growing importance of mobile with on average 34% of sessions coming from mobile users. Your own stats may be even higher than this dependant on sector.More than half of Google searches now start on mobile.
• #5: One of the main considerations for users on mobile devices which you have no control over is network speed. Unlike desktop users mobile users don’t always have a high speed connection so your site could take a lot longer to load. As you can see from these average connection speeds there is huge difference between a good 4G connection and a bad GPRS connection which needs to be considered when you think an average web page in 2016 is between 2mb - 4mb. To give you an idea on the right hand side of the chart you can see the time it would take to download a 2mb webpage using each network connection. According to recent research, 40% of consumers will leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load. Three seconds is not a very long time Although 4G adoption has more than doubled in the last year, coverage isn’t widespread and in some cases users don’t even achieve a 3G connection so we must still consider users with GPRS and EDGE connections for a while to come. Which you can see does pose certain challenges
• #6: Theres no doubt about it a fast loading mobile site is better for your customers. Pages that take a longer time to load will frustrate your users potentially abandoning your site resulting in higher bounce rates, lower average time on page and lower conversion rates as there are less visitors to your site. If your bounce rate is above 60% this is something that you should look into.
• #7: To illustrate this a recent study on a leading online retailer with a significant amount of mobile traffic found that mobile pages that loaded in over 4 seconds had half the amount of conversions than those that loaded in just over 2 seconds
• #8: Looking at bounce rate across you can see the faster the load time the lower the bounce rate… the bounce rates steadily increasing with longer load times.
• #9: Having a slow mobile site or no mobile site not only impacts your users but it also has a negative affects on your SEO
• #10: Website speed is a factor within Google’s ranking algorithm. This means if your website is slow it may not rank as well as faster loading websites in mobile search results.
• #11: Its also worth noting that since April 2015 mobile responsiveness became a ranking factor for mobile search results. In May 2016 Google rolled out an update to its algorithm that further increased ranking results for mobile-friendly sites. Websites which are not optimised for mobile traffic (i.e. responsiveness or dedicated mobile site) will typically see lower rankings for mobile search results.
• #12: So how do you know how slow your site is? Lets take a look at a few free to use tools you can use to determine your page speed
• #13: Google page speed is probably the easiest tool to use and gives you a clear breakdown of how your site scores Mobile-friendliness: This looks at the the quality of the experience customers have when they’re browsing your site on their phones. Mobile speed: This is how long it takes your site to load on mobile devices. Desktop speed: This is how long it takes your site to load on desktop computers.
• #14: Pingdom lets you identify what about a web page is fast, slow, too big, what best practices you’re not following, and so on. Its slightly more technical compared to Google page speed but is very useful for identifying particular issues.
• #15: Others https://gtmetrix.com/ - Analyze your page with Google PageSpeed and Yahoo! YSlow rulesets http://www.webpagetest.org/ - Multiple geographic locations (ideally this choice should be made based on your users’ most common locations) Different browsers Different connection types Mobile devices JavaScript enabled/disabled clients
• #16: So we’ve looked at the importance of page speed and how to identify if you have a slow loading site. Most of the tools mentioned previously will even be able to identify particular areas for improvement. So I’ll quickly run through some of these to give you a top level understanding of what they are. If you are using a CMS like Wordpress there are various plugins that will handle some of the optimisations for you.
• #17: So we’ve looked at the importance of page speed and how to identify if you have a slow loading site. Most of the tools mentioned previously will even be able to identify particular areas for improvement. So I’ll quickly run through some of these to give you a top level understanding of what they are. If you are using a CMS like Wordpress there are various plugins that will handle some of the optimisations for you.