Despite all of the delicate intricacies of creating an amazing site for Google’s mobile-first world, the number one thing killing any given mobile site is remarkably simple: It’s too slow.
Speed has always been a major predictor of SEO success. However, it’s never been more important than it will be over the next few years as we all shift to mobile-first design, while faster phones and networks make the average user even less likely to wait for your site to load.
With so much at stake, here are a few ways to make sure your mobile site is as fast as possible.
Pay for Quality Hosting
Right now a lot of Canadian businesses are sabotaging their website’s speed by opting to go with a cheap overseas hosting company. In this case, cheap is very expensive.
You’re much better off paying a little bit more for a more local and reliable hosting company. For example, HostPapa is Canada's #1 web host because they offer top-notch performance and uptime stats.
A simple 100-millisecond delay in load time can hurt your SEO and even drop your conversion rates by 7%.
Avoid Freebie Website Builders
This is another place where trying to save a bit of money can cost you a lot.
If you’re a small business owner who operates a landscaping company or a catering company, you might be doing great with referral business. You may decide to use a freebie site builder like Wix, just to put up some sort of web presence and this free site builder looks “Good enough.”
Well, these tools are not good enough anymore, as they don’t really have mobile-first in mind. Most will have you build your desktop site first and then you can click the “Mobile Preview” button to see what this site could look like on a visitors’ phone. That was good enough in 2013, but mobile design cannot be an afterthought anymore.
If you bypass mobile design, mobile traffic will bypass your site.
Test Your Mobile Site Speed Properly
You need to test your site properly and frequently.
First of all, too many businesses will run a speed test on their home page, get a good score and assume this applies to their entire site. It does not! You’ve literally only tested a single page. Your crucial product pages and blog pages could have considerably higher load times. So, we need to perform site-wide speed tests, focusing on the pages that drive the most business for you.
At the same time, you probably can’t get away with doing this once a year. Too many businesses will test their site’s speed in January and not do it again until the following January. Meanwhile, their site is now weighed down by 12 months worth of content and plugins that have been added.
The more often you publish new pages or blogs, the more you need to stay on top of your site’s overall performance, and prune your content accordingly.
Google is looking at your mobile site first, so that’s where your focus needs to be. You need to set your site up to succeed with quality web hosting and mobile design, while staying on top of your entire site’s performance.
Otherwise, a slow mobile site could be daring your visitors to go to your competition’s mobile site.