How to Improve Mobile Speed for Magento 2

Improve Mobile Speed for Magento 2

Mobile commerce has become the next big thing in the last few years. With the increase in smartphone and internet penetration across the world, more and more users are interested in shopping through mobile devices. In the USA, mobile commerce makes up over half of online shopping, making it a massively lucrative avenue for online businesses.

According to statistics, by the end of 2021, mobile commerce is expected to claim as much as 54% of the overall online shopping. That’s one reason why more and more online retailers are rushing through into the world of mobile commerce.

Magento is one of the world’s leading eCommerce web development platforms that powers hundreds of thousands of eCommerce stores. Some of the biggest industry players including Procter & Gamble, Ford, Nike, and many others are currently using the platform.

Magento brings in powerful features and flexible functionalities, allowing online stores to create highly customized and versatile web stores that meet and exceed the expectations of customers. The platform is also highly preferred given its strong features that let developers optimize Magento stores for search engines, and users’ perspectives.

However, with all the powerful features, Magento still sometimes lags to meet mobile speed expectations. Slow mobile speed for Magento 2 stores badly affects the performance and conversion rates for online stores. Since customers aren’t ready to buy from stores that offer a poor user experience with pages that take ages to load. So, if your Magento 2 mobile website isn’t optimized, you are in to take some serious losses in business revenue.

Fortunately, various Magento optimization services can help improve the mobile speed for Magento stores. Here in this blog, we will be looking at various techniques and approached you can take to optimize mobile speed for Magento 2 stores. But first, let’s see why you need to optimize page speed for your online Magento 2 store.

Why Magento 2 Mobile Speed Optimization is Important?

With the increase in mobile commerce, users are increasingly looking for companies that offer top user experiences. In fact, with Google’s mobile-first index, Magento 2 store owners need to optimize the speed of stores for mobile devices, failure to which may lead to lower search engine ranking. The ultimate goal of Magento 2 speed optimization is to improve the user experience.

With massive competition in the mobile commerce industry, you need to ensure user satisfaction across all devices including mobile devices. With slow loading pages, you are prone to upset the users from the very beginning, which results in high bounce rates, and lower conversion rates for your store.

Alternatively, with fast-loading pages, you are able to mark superior user experience and increase your chances to make sales.

How Mobile Speed Optimization Increases sales?

The user experience and website performance have a massive influence over the conversion rates. Various studies have shown that faster loading websites are able to maintain a higher conversion rate compared to slow loading websites. This simply means, with an optimized Magento 2 mobile speed, you are more likely to attract and convert users with targeted actions.

Now, if you are thinking about what’s the right loading time of the web page, here is a quick overview for you.

According to statistics, nearly 50% of users expect a webpage to completely load in 2 seconds or less. Here are some other findings of the study about website loading speeds;

• Websites with a loading time of 2 to 3 seconds have a nearly 2% conversion rate
• Loading time above 3 seconds drops the conversion rate to 1.5%
• Loading time above 4 seconds further drops the conversion rate to below 1%
• Loading time above 5 seconds squeeze the conversion rate to merely 0.6%

Various other studies found a stark connection of loading time to conversion rates;

• According to a study by Walmart, every 1-second improvement in loading time of web pages results in up to a 2% increase in conversion rate
• COOK was able to increase the conversion rate by as much as 7% by reducing the loading time by merely 0.85 seconds
• An improvement of 1.11% in conversion rate was achieved by Mobify for each 100ms improvement in their website’s loading time

And while all of the above-mentioned stats seem relatively small, these have massive impacts on the overall revenue generation of online stores. For instance, an eCommerce store that generates USD 10 million yearly, can increase its revenue by 20% (USD 200,000) by lowering its load time by merely 1 second. That’s one reason why many eCommerce stores hire professional Magento 2 development companies to optimize the speed of their stores and improve conversion rates.

Tips to Improve mobile speed for Magento 2

Well, now that we have gone through the pressing reasons of optimizing Magento 2 mobile speed, let’s quickly move on and see some helpful tips to optimize Magento 2 mobile speed;

1. Load above-the-fold Content First

If you are not familiar with the above-the-fold content, it refers to the section of a webpage that users see instantly as they land on the webpage (before they scroll down. Since this is the first content (section) users would see, it is important to get it to load faster.

Here is how you can achieve it:

–  Defer Parsing of JavaScript

Deferring parsing of JavaScript simply means that you postpone the execution and loading of JavaScript code. This helps in the faster loading of the above-the-fold section on the screen.

To defer the execution of JavaScript, you can simply use various Magento 2 extensions to move all JS to the bottom of the page.

–  Load critical CSS first

Critical CSS is usually only a small section of the overall CSS of the site, which is used to render the above-the-fold content. However, to achieve better mobile speed, it’s recommended to isolate the critical CSS and have it load first, which would subsequently render the visible content faster. With Magento integration services, online stores can isolate critical CSS automatically for easier optimization of mobile speed.

Also, it’s highly recommended to compose separate critical CSS for different pages including, homepage, product pages, checkout pages, etc.

2. Make page size as small as possible

Typically the data speed for mobile networks is lower as compared to desktop broadband connections. This means that it’s even more important for Magento 2 mobile sites to optimize their pages for better performance. To put it simply, the lighter the page size, the better the page loading speed.

Here’s how you can make website pages lighter for Magento 2 mobile optimization;

–  Use Gzip Compression

Gzip is a great technology tool that helps online stores to decrease the size of a webpage by up to 70%. The tool can also be used to compress font scripts, CSS, JavaScript, and other external scripts. You can ask for more details about Gzip technology for your Magento 2 store from your hosting support team, which should not take much time to configure.

–  Use CSS/JS minification

JS/CSS minification feature is offered with Magento 2, which is a great tool to leverage for mobile speed optimization. If you enable the minification from the “Developer” mode of Magento 2. If you aren’t much into the tech side, get help from some professional Magento 2 Development Company, who will be able to get it done in no time.

–  Optimize Images

eCommerce stores are required to have hundreds of high-quality product images. While these images are necessary to attract and convert users, these can also significantly increase the size of the webpage; resulting in higher loading times. That’s why it’s important to optimize and compress all images used in the website to the lowest weight possible.

Again, various Magento extensions can help you compress images easily. Also, most of the Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) support image compressions, so you can sign-up for them for few extra bucks.

3. Utilize The Power of HTTP/2

HTTP/2 represents the latest version of the hypertext protocol. The protocol is meant to improvise the safety and speed of web browsing.

Magento 2 works seamlessly with the HTTP version 2 with just two basic requirements including;

• SSL integration for all the web pages
• Server support for HTTP version 2

You can get in touch with the hosting support for assistance and configuration of HTTP/2 for your Magento 2 mobile store.

4. Do Not Use JS Bundling

Magento 2 supports the bundling of JavaScript files. The JavaScript bundled files may become too heavy (5MB – 13MB), which would become a performance hog; especially for slow mobile networks.

Thereby, it’s important to “Disable” the JS bundling option for your Magento 2 store.

5. Optimize Time to First Byte (TTFB)

Time to First Byte (TTFB) represents the time required for the browser to get a response from the site’s server. For optimum website performance, the TTFC wait time should be around 500 MS.

With the full-page cache functionality of Magento 2, the platform is able to optimize the service response time if the page is visited more than 1 time. However, there are certain pages like checkout pages that can’t be fully cached and thereby, result in slow response time. Thereby, it’s important to optimize TTFB for better website performance. The easiest way to improve the TTFB is to upgrade the hosting plan.

That’s because many times hosting server power isn’t adequate to smoothly run a large Magento 2 eCommerce store. Alternatively, you may require additional CPU and RAM to get the TTFB response down.

You can easily check for the adequacy of your server by installing a fresh copy of Magento 2 (same version) of the same server for comparison with the live site. If the performance of the fresh copy is faster than your live site, you may need to upgrade the hosting server.

Final Words

The key to successful eCommerce lies in exceptional customer service. With the rise of mobile commerce, it becomes even more essential for online stores to optimize their mobile speeds to the mobile network limitations. With the above-mentioned steps, you can vastly improve the website loading speed for mobile sides. This subsequently would lead to better customer experience, improve conversion rates, and more revenue for your store

FAQs:

How to find the best company for Magento 2 Mobile Optimization in UAE?

UAE is home to various reputed and well-established Magento 2 development companies. However, to choose the right Magento 2 development company you should;

• Determine your needs
• Have a realistic budget
• Be clear about your requirement
• Make sure the company is Magento Certified Partner
• Make sure the company has extensive industry experience
• Make sure the company use the latest Magento store development processes
• Company that maintains data integrity and security

Why is Magento 2 Mobile Optimization important for eCommerce Stores?

The primary goal of Magento 2 mobile optimization is to improve the user experience for the eCommerce stores. In today’s highly competitive eCommerce industry, customers are always looking for exceptional and out-of-the-box user experience and any delay in webpage loading times badly influences the customer experience. Thereby, all eCommerce stores need to optimize their mobile Magento 2 stores for faster loading speed.

How is Folio 3, the best company for Magento 2 Mobile Optimization?

Folio3 is a leading software and web development agency in the USA. The company has served hundreds of businesses of all sizes including Fortune 500 companies with its technologically superior and robust web and software development services. As a Magento Certified partner, you can trust Folio3 for high-performance, mobile-optimized Magento 2 stores that drive revenue for your business.

Can speed optimization help with customer retention?

Yes, speed-optimized mobile apps can help with customer retention. That’s because such apps are responsive and offer a combination of simple yet responsive interfaces. Also, users, today are increasingly looking for faster loading apps that deliver a smooth shopping experience. Thereby, speed optimization through custom Magento or Shopify development app can undoubtedly help store owners to increase customer retention.

Hiring The Third-Party Website Development Agency

The previously mentioned tips for increasing the Magento 2 performance and speed seem pretty complicated. However, you can hire the Magento or Shopify website design agency because they can tweak the Magento 2 stores, change the coding, optimize the features, and remove JS bundling while you focus on other aspects of the business processes.