By Jim Clanin
Incredibly, 40% of people will leave your mobile website if it doesn’t load within three seconds, so designing a user-friendly interface isn’t the only important component of responsive mobile design. It needs to load quickly, however, 72% of responsive mobile sites share the same page weight as their large screen versions. That means they load slower and could be missing out on 40% of their potential business. Is your mobile website one of them?
Let’s talk about some of the methods currently available to web designers to cut down on load times and boost your mobile website’s speed. First, let’s go over the two main characteristics of mobile phones.
Small Screens
The average smartphone screen is about six square inches. The smaller laptops, like the MacBook Pro with 15-inch display has a little over 100 square inches. That means that by reducing the amount of content we display, we optimize performance. Plus, users enjoy a better experience and are more likely to buy.
Small Batteries
Remember those three seconds I mentioned? It’s actually more like one second. You see, mobile phones rely on radios for all their functions, and they have small batteries that are carefully managed to maximize efficiency. 2G and 3G phones may need up to two seconds to establish a connection, which means you have one second left before you lose 40% of your users. We call this the “golden second.”
Seizing the Golden Second
How do you make the most of that golden second?
Real World Testing
It can be easy for web designers and developers to take their bandwidth for granted, as we rely on fixed-line connections and high-bandwidth Wi-Fi to do our job. That’s why it’s so important to simulate the mobile bandwidth conditions of the real-world when conducting testing. By using a wireless router that supports bandwidth limiting, we can test website performance at various stages of development, avoiding surprises during formal testing.
Watch Your Metrics
“If you can’t measure something, you can’t manage it.” Management consultant Peter Drucker couldn’t be more right. Close monitoring the content users view and what device they view it from is essential to boosting your mobile site performance.
For example, you may see that your most popular pages on your current website are your home page, About Us page, and Services page. After you’ve launched your mobile site, metrics may tell you that users click most often on the Services page, so your web design company could tweak the design to make that page easy to access, or put that content on the main page while moving less popular content to sub-pages. Constant monitoring allows you to continually adjust your mobile site to provide for the best user experience.
Separate or Responsive?
Responsive Web Design can be a good option for those websites that simply need to alter layout between devices. However, a separately designed mobile website is a better choice when performance is vital. Many an inexperienced web design company has created a separate mobile website and made common mistakes, like taking every page from the desktop site and putting it on a single mobile home page, or preventing the user from accessing the desktop site at all. Unfortunately these websites get docked by Google and have given separate mobile websites a bad reputation.
In an effectively designed separate mobile website, it’s easy for users to return to the previous page or to the home page. A good mobile web designer uses creative solutions to squeeze content like video, images, and HTML into smaller formats for quicker loading, better performance, and a more positive UI.
While Responsive Web Design is often the perfect option for a business, it isn’t always. When performance is critical, a separately designed mobile website can generate a big increase in successful outcomes. If you have a mobile website, are you concerned that it’s losing you customers? DoubleDome Web Technologies can help you discover – and implement – the most effective mobile strategy for your business.
