The mobile site speed has an important role to play in creating a positive user experience for your site’s visitors. The ideal loading time for a mobile site is 3 seconds, if it takes longer than that, then you need to do something about it.

Here are a few reasons why your mobile site speed matters and what you can achieve from increasing your site speed by 0.1 second:

• Increases your conversion rates by 10.1% for travel sites and 8.4% for retail sites.
• Increases progression rates. This includes visitors moving from one part of the marketing funnel to the next deeper one. 
• Improves check-out completion and booking rates for travel sites.
• Generates more views and increases lead generation.

Benefits Of Optimizing Your Site Speed

Optimizing your site speed does have quite a few dramatic impacts on your users and the ranking of your website. Listed below are the benefits you can avail from optimizing your speed to a few seconds:

SEO Best Practice

Google’s top priority is to get information to users as quickly as possible, this is why site speed is a crucial factor in search rankings of Google. The performance of a site on mobile devices is critical for SEO. 

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate refers to the percentage of people that leave a site without viewing any other pages or taking any action. This is usually when the pages take too long to load, you will lose users for each additional second added to your site loading speed.

User Experience

Slow loading speed and poor reaction time to users’ actions make for bad user experience. When content takes too long to load, users get frustrated and leave the site or the application entirely.  

Factors Affecting Mobile Site Speed

A website that is quick to load keeps users engaged for much longer and ranks higher in the SERPs, which in turn increases its organic traffic. The subsequent result of this is higher conversion rates, which then increases sales.

You must comprehend the various aspects and elements that your mobile site needs to focus on in order to strengthen your credibility and the customer base.

Network Conditions

Slow network causes websites to load slowly even if they were originally designed to be lightweight. Network connectivity is impacted by the internet service provider (ISP)’s services and the local network equipment being used. Moreover, mobile devices that use 4G or 3G rather than the Internet, have slower networks. 

While the developer cannot do anything about this, web resources can be delivered quickly despite slow connections with techniques like compression, magnification, and using CDN to host content.

Page Weight

The resources that a site needs to load is hugely impactful on the site’s load time. Though it is difficult, you will need to keep the site light; with fast-loading pages and small file sizes. 

The more complex your mobile site is i.e., more functionality added to each page, pop-up ads for third parties, and moving backgrounds, all of this increases your site’s weight. Thus the loading speed slows down.  

Hosting Location

If the hosting location of your content is far from where it is required, you will face high network latency. 

For example, if your site’s images are hosted in San Francisco, the CSS and HTML files are hosted in a data center in Miami, and the user is in Dubai, the user will have to wait some time while the files travel miles to get to their device.  

Important Performance Metrics

We know that you have spent time, effort, and money on your mobile site and that you now want it to succeed. So for you, we have listed below the important performance metrics that you need to focus on in order to drive success right into your hands.  

Page size

Refers to the overall file size for all of the resources that are required to be loaded in order for the page to function. The page size affects the speed with which the browser loads the page and it may also impact the mobile users who pay for data to load web pages.  

Load Time

Load time refers to the time it takes for the entire mobile site to appear in the browser. It indicates how fast each HTTP request is fulfilled. Nearly every page on the Internet will need numerous HTTP requests since apart from the page’’s core HTML, multiple other resources are required to be loaded.

Number Of Round Trips

The number of round trips indicates the number of times that  a request or response must travel from a user to the origin server and back. The latency rises with the number of round trips that a webpage makes.

Time To First Byte

The time it takes for a browser to receive the very first byte of the answer after it has requested a site for information is gauged by a metric called Time To First Byte (TTFB).

Even though the overall load time holds more significance, TTFB is still taken into consideration when the performance of a website is being evaluated and it may impact your SEO ranking as well.

Round Trip Time

Round Trip Time (RTT)) refers to the time requests take for a complete round trip. This includes traveling to the origin server and returning to the device from which the request was initiated.