Mobile Optimization for WordPress Websites. Speed up, improve UX, increase Google & GTmetrix scores

Desktop computers have more powerful processors and they often have more reliable Internet connection speeds than mobile devices on the carrier’s data network. This means that sites on mobile devices often load slightly slower than on desktop computers, even if the site is optimized for mobile devices. Page speed (or your website loading speed) is an important aspect of mobile search engine optimization (SEO). Web performance affects not only search rankings but also your mobile experience. Page speed optimization for mobile devices includes roundtrip request handling, render blocking, lazy loading, compression, caching, and HTML Mobile Accelerated Page (AMP-HTML) code options.

This is the reason why online business owners need to invest in mobile optimization, not just in desktop one. If the mobile version of your website doesn’t work or loads slowly, it negatively impacts your overall ranking on all devices.

The Google search engine offers a Search Console tool to evaluate the loading of a site on mobile devices. To check if a web page is mobile-friendly, you need to enter its URL. If the site is under development, it is possible to connect the code to the Search Console for evaluation. If the result of the check is negative, it is worth conducting mobile optimization.

Pagespeed optimization is crucial for website SEO. Search engines don’t bring slow websites to the top. If the page load speed is low, the following indicators fall:

• site traffic;
• the number of potential customers;
• sales;
• company’s profit.

WordPress mobile optimization services are a way to prevent it. Pagespeed improvement is necessary for any website — from tiny blogs to big stores. Next, consider our company’s approach to mobile page speed optimization in WordPress.

Before we start optimizing, we check the website for performance, mobile responsiveness, loading speed, and other characteristics. To do this, our expert developers use the following tools:

• GTmetrix. This is a web service that allows you to analyze the speed of loading a site and get recommendations for optimization. With the help of GTmetrix, our webmasters get different speed indicators and analyze them. On this basis, they identify the main slowing factors.
• PageSpeed Insights. The service allows us to evaluate the site loading speed in points and get a report on the site loading on mobile devices and computers. Further, experts offer optimization options if the site has not passed the speed test.
• Lighthouse. We use this tool to evaluate how a site is optimized for search engines, compatible with web applications, and accessible to users. If there are problems in these aspects, we will offer an effective solution.
• Google Mobile-Friendly Test. With the help of this service, we check the adaptability of the website to mobile devices. Developers audit each page separately and the site as a whole. After that, we determine if mobile website optimization is necessary.

Without testing, it is impossible to identify problems with adaptability to mobile devices. Next, let’s look at how our team is approaching mobile site optimization based on the test results.

We provide full range optimization services

Free audit

In 24 hours or less we provide a detailed audit (Google PageSpeed Insights, GTMetrix) of your website. Highlighting the most essentials issues that should be improved and detailed estimation of these tasks

Services

Lazy Loading Images

Render blocking resources

Server optimization

JS & CSS optimization

Content delivery network

Database optimization

Image Compression

Cache configuration

Image optimization

Browser Caching

Fullpage Caching

Expected results

95+

Get Free Website Speed Audit

We would like to draw your attention to the fact that we do not conduct an SEO audit. We can advise SEO specialists who will analyze the site and suggest changes. We, in turn, can introduce these practices as part of mobile optimization. However, we can tell you about the best SEO practices.

You should minimize the codebase, enable browser caching, decrease the number of redirects, and optimize images. We can help to improve your WordPress website via these methods.

GoogleBot for smartphones sees and identifies site’s elements like users. Mobile devices could not support all these elements some years ago, but now they can.

Pictures, banners, buttons, headers, and other elements must be adapted to mobile screens. Take into account that your WP web page should be user-friendly.

If a user’s phone does not support this plugin, the user can’t see important information. Use HTML5 to create wow effects.

Since the mobile screen is smaller and operated with fingers, it can sometimes be difficult to close them. Therefore, users may leave the site, resulting in high bounce rates.

Navigation on the touch screen is carried out with the thumb. Due to this, buttons should not be too large, very small, or be on the thinger’s path. We recommend choosing responsive themes in WordPress to create a convenient mobile version.

When a user searches for something on a mobile device, he enters in the search line only a few words. Because of this, titles and meta descriptions must be short and concise.

You can use responsive, dynamic, or standalone site configuration. Google prefers responsive design but accepts any option.

Our developers have a comprehensive approach to pagespeed optimization. Thanks to this, it is possible to achieve high loading speed rates and site performance. Steps followed by our WordPress development company:

• Check up. First of all, we check the website’s performance and loading speed. At this stage, our specialists are looking for factors that slow down the page, for example, there may be heavy images, dirty code, etc.
• Combining files. Our developers merge CSS and JavaScript files where possible. This reduces the load on the server, requiring less traffic to load the page. As a result, the WP mobile user experience increases.
• Create a page-loading strategy. We determine which site parts are the most important for the user and search engines. For example, for an online store, this will be a catalog and a quick order form, because the user wants to quickly view the assortment and purchase the product. This makes the site more SEO-friendly.
• File compression. To improve mobile speed WordPress uses gzip technology. This is one of the most popular ways to compress images because it can be configured on most servers. The smaller the image size, the faster the page will load.
• Setting up caching. You can choose to cache the page or individual objects. Thanks to the cache, when the site is reopened, the server takes less time to load, because the website part is already saved and does not need to be opened from scratch.

It is very difficult to create a mobile-friendly WordPress website without special skills and abilities. We recommend hiring a WordPress developer to optimize your web page for mobile devices. Let’s see how our developers approach WordPress site optimization, and what technologies and tools they use:

• CSS optimization. CSS — the styles used on the site. Optimization includes removing unused styles, consolidating CSS files, and minifying. Minification includes removing unnecessary characters, spaces, and other elements. These actions allow you to reduce the number of requests to the server, and the load on it and optimize websites for mobile WordPress.
• JS optimization. A large number of heavy JavaScript files leads to website slowdown. Optimization is aimed at reducing their size and number. It usually includes minification, file concatenation, and lazy or asynchronous script loading. As a result, you get a WordPress website with a high loading speed.
• Images WP optimization for mobile. Since pictures are one of the most common speed loss problems, they need to be given special attention. Our developers optimize images by reducing the file size, changing the format to a more efficient format (for example, WebP is popular), or using lazy loading technology. The latter method allows images to be loaded only when they are in the user’s field of vision.
• Using CDN (Content Delivery Network). CDN is a system of servers distributed around the world. They work together to deliver your site’s content to users as quickly as possible. For this, a server is used, which is located as close as possible to the user. A CDN can help fix download speed issues related to users’ geographic location.
• HTML minification. The technique involves removing unnecessary characters and comments, thereby reducing the file size. This allows you to optimize page loading speed.
• Checking Plugins. Overusing plugins or using plugins that are not configured properly can slow down your site significantly. Remove unnecessary plugins and make sure all plugins you use are configured correctly and up to date.
• Using HTTP/2. HTTP/2 is faster than HTTP/1.1, so switching to HTTP/2 can improve your site’s speed.
• Resource prefetching. This is a technique that allows the browser to download resources that will be needed in the future, improving WordPress website performance.
• Using the AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) protocol. This is a Google initiative that aims to speed up mobile web pages. AMP pages have simplified HTML/CSS and limit the use of JavaScript, making them load faster on mobile devices.

If your WordPress website is mobile-friendly, this reduces the risk of bounces, increases user engagement, and hence conversions. Now we will tell you how our developers can make your web page mobile-friendly as part of mobile site optimization.

Before starting to improve the mobile version, developers check how convenient and fast it is. To do this, they use Think With Google and PageSpeed Insights tools. After verification, indicators such as Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, etc.

Images for smartphones and tablets should be much smaller than those for desktops. We optimize images using various technologies so that they take a minimum of time to load and do not overload the server. Image resizing is one of the most important parts of mobile optimization.

In mobile networks, the delay will always be higher, so it is necessary to improve the speed with the help of SDN. In addition, we check how fast your DNS is. We recommend using CloudFlare. We configure it for smooth and stable operation.Thanks to this, it is possible to reduce network latency and increase the speed of loading the site.

Some plugins do not need to be loaded on the mobile version of the site. Our developers analyze which plugins are loaded and are not functionally important and deactivate or remove them. However, before that, they set up caching for the mobile version, because this is one of the mobile website optimization key parts.

The lower the image quality, the lower the load on the server, which means the faster the site loads. With an unstable Internet connection, you should reduce the quality of the pictures. The specialists of our WordPress development company can implement such a feature and increase the user experience of your website.

If the site has a lot of comments or reviews, it is not necessary that they all load at once. We can add a “Show More” button. If the user is interested in reading more reviews, he will click on it and see all the messages. Thanks to this mobile optimization of the WordPress website, the number of requests to the server is significantly reduced, therefore, the mobile web page works faster.

The higher the version of the language in which the main code is written, the faster the web page loads, it is better protected from hacking and the page speed increases. Our expert developers can update your site’s PHP syntax to enhance the mobile user experience.

Responsive design can be achieved using the CSS language because it is responsible for the style of the web page. Using CSS, programmers set colors, sizes, fonts, and other elements. The CSS for media queries plays an important role. They allow you to add conditions to the style of the site. For example, apply color to a site element only when hovering over it, etc. Apart from this, there are other important aspects of CSS. One of them is images and, in particular, their adaptation to the space in which they appear. Starting with version 4.4, browsers automatically render images as small as possible via the special HTML attribute. This saves bandwidth, which makes everything faster.

Developers use different media queries for each device. Next, we will demonstrate what these queries are capable of, and how we apply them to different devices.

Every request starts with @media (hence the name). It can define conditional styles for different types of media or devices. Our developers use attributes that define the rules that apply to the screens of computers, tablets, etc. A typical CSS media query is the most common type you’ll find in responsive design.

According to the WordPress codex, media queries are placed at the end of the style.css file. This is because browsers read style sheets from top to bottom. Anything at the bottom overrides any rules at the top. Next, consider the most popular queries for mobile devices.

When writing media queries for mobile devices, screen sizes are taken into account. Basically, the most popular diagonals are taken into account. A common CSS media query for mobile devices is menu styling, as these devices often have completely different menu requirements. The typical horizontal menu used on desktop screens doesn’t work on a phone because it makes the buttons too small to press with your finger. Another popular way to use a media query is to move the sidebar below the main content section.

According to StatCounter statistics, the most popular screen sizes on the Internet are:
360×640 — 11,93%;
1366×768 — 8,95%;
1920×1080 — 8,28%.

These are phone, tablet, and desktop screen sizes. Based on these statistics, we can now select media query breakpoints. This is something you can add to your media query where the design elements on either side of it will behave differently. To adapt to three screen sizes, we add two breakpoints. However, according to the statistics of StatCounter, about 39 percent are indeterminate sizes. Consider how we optimize for them.

We define breakpoints depending on your design. That is, they are placed not depending on specific gadgets, but where they are needed. Thus, there is no need to optimize the site for hundreds of smartphone models, the design looks organic on any device. As a result, the content is not cut off, the site elements are conveniently located. After optimization, the user experience increases significantly.

We have a wide experience in mobile page speed optimization. Our team consists of experienced developers who know the WordPress websites’ features. We have optimized a large number of websites, developed dozens of them, and increased productivity. Main reasons to contact us:

• extensive experience in WP mobile optimization;
• individual and comprehensive approach to each project;
• providing advice on functions, and website optimization.

Our team knows the intricacies of WordPress site optimization and can achieve high performance. If you want to get a fast website, improve user experience, and ensure page loading in a short time, just write to us. We can provide a preliminary estimate of the work cost and deadlines. Check out our portfolio and customer testimonials to see our professionalism. Remember that a fast and reliable website is the foundation of a successful business. Hire experienced developers and get professional advice in a few clicks!