If you look after a site that’s suffering poor mobile speed, then as a first step, carry out these 10 checks. They are informed by common drivers of poor website speed: The 10 Don’ts.
For every Don’t, we’ve provided you with the relatively easy Do too; a step or fix that you can put in place to improve speed. I mean, we’re not talking HTML, JavaScript or CSS coding here, nothing too complicated. Just simple solutions in most cases, like repositioning an existing widget on the page. In fact, some of these steps will take you just minutes to give your site the boost it needs.
Seek some comfort in the fact that Google’s Lighthouse test parameters are ‘highly aspirational’. Especially so, if you’re building websites using an off-the-shelf platform like Squarespace, Duda or Wix because many of the issues highlighted by the Lighthouse report are likely to be outside of your control.
To help put things into perspective for you, Google ideally wants your pages to load in under 2 seconds. (Or preferably, in under half a second!) Lighthouse will give you a ‘warning’ if your pages take an average of 3-4 seconds to load. And it will issue a ‘fail’ for anything over 4 seconds. Meanwhile, this is far-off what’s happening in the real world. As of December 2021, the average page loading time for desktops was 10.3 seconds and 27.3 seconds on mobile devices.
So, when you take that into account, you’re probably not faring as badly ‘in the speed department’ as you first feared?
TOP TIP: Sharing this real world fact with your clients could provide them with a helpful ‘wider perspective’ too, enabling you to manage their expectations about page speed more effectively.
It’s always worth bearing in mind that mobile speed test results can fluctuate depending on many factors. Meaning, they do not necessarily reflect the user-experience (UX). In fact, the best way to test if speed is a problem, is to carry out your own real-time mobile UX test. Simply hop on your mobile and ‘shop’ the site as if you were a customer. If you experience buffering on specific pages, that tells you where you need to focus your mobile speed optimisation efforts.
Ultimately (given most searches are carried out on mobiles) a real-time mobile UX test is the most effective way to console yourself and your clients that you’re providing a good user experience for the majority of visitors.
Insites is a complete digital marketing audit that evaluates over 200 factors and combines them into a single, easy to understand report for your agency clients. We run a Google Lighthouse audit on the website’s homepage and include those key performance metrics. Unlike Google’s own tooling, we surface the key metrics and explain things in simple, easy to understand language. Run a test to determine your site’s mobile speed performance today. You can also sign up for a 7-day free trial to test a range of other website health metrics too.
05th May 2022
03rd January 2024