Are Your Mobile Pages Loading Under One Second?

We have already discussed in a number of posts how your pagespeed score affects or helps your website’s ranking. Google has made an announcement yesterday (08.Aug. 2013) saying that it was launching new guidelines and updated PageSpeed Insights Tool. The PageSpeed tool has been there already but the updated PageSpeed Insight Tool aims at helping webmasters optimize their websites for mobile pages for better online performance. Google has also updated its PageSpeed guidelines too along these lines.

Many people today make use of smartphones to look for information because it is fast and it is very easy for the customers to access the web on the go. In Google’s survey, on an average, web pages take more than 7 seconds for loading. Google’s question to the webmasters is, “Wouldn’t it be great if mobile pages loaded in under one second?”

Google also notes that if the pages take too long to load then many users leave the web page even before the pages are loaded. The new guidelines issued by the search engine focuses more on helping the webmasters to speed up the pages by rendering part of the page content called above the fold content in one second or less so that the users are kept engaged. The idea here is to ensure that your visitors are engaged while the rest of the page is loaded rather than waiting for all the content to load all at once where by the visitors are made to wait. The technical name for the pre-loading or the loading of the above-the-fold-content whether it is HTML, CSS or JS is called the critical rendering path.

Google offers the webmasters with a number of suggestions to achieve sub-second rendering of the content for the mobile networks. Here are few such suggestions from Google on above the fold content rendering.

The first recommendation from Google is that your server should render the response within 200ms. Secondly, you should try to minimize the number of redirects involved before loading your page. If you have too many redirects before the loading of your pages then it will certainly increase the loading time.

You should also check whether your website has too many roundtrips while rendering the pages. If there are too many roundtrips while rendering the pages, then your pages will have poor pagespeed score. Google also recommends strongly that webmasters avoid using external blocking JavaScript and CSS in the above the fold content which has to be loaded first.

Your web pages should have a reserve time of 200 ms for browser layout and rendering. Your JavaScript should also be optimized for fast loading. These are just a few suggestions and guidelines from Google on enhancing your pagespeed for faster mobile performance. You will be able to get more detailed information on the help section for mobile specific pages. Google continues to emphasize the importance of improving your website’s performance on mobile devices because Google sees the increasing potential in this segment.

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