According to Google, 54% of people say that a business’s mobile website load time affects how long they stay on a website. As a site’s mobile load time increases, so does the user’s frustration. An article by Think with Google indicates that they’ve seen a one-second delay in mobile load times impact conversion rates by up to 20% – that’s crazy! This kind of data stresses the importance of a mobile-first website. If you don’t give users the experience they expect, they may go elsewhere.

Lead with Mobile Speed

Good news for multifamily marketers – if a slow mobile experience drives customers away, that means fast load times can help attract and keep them. The milliseconds faster your website is than a competitor may lead to higher conversion rates.

Image Optimization

Image optimization helps your company reap the benefits of a faster mobile experience. High-resolution images can slow down mobile site speed if not managed appropriately. Slow mobile load speeds often result in higher bounce rates, fewer conversions, and missed revenue opportunities. When planning to optimize your website for mobile site speed, start by evaluating the images on your site.

  1. Choose efficient image formats in order to decrease their weight on your website. By choosing the correct format, you can shave bytes off of your page size. WebP formatted images can be used for photographic and translucent images at 30% more compression than JPEG, without image quality losses. JPEGs should be used for photos with no transparency, PNGs for images with transparent backgrounds, and SVGs for scalable icons and shapes.
  2. Compress and resize images to improve performance. Experiment with quality settings when compressing your images. Removing metadata (such as the date, time, and camera specifications) from the image can also help. A lot of this work can be automated. Running a script reduces the manual work for designers.
  3. Prioritize images in order of importance and consider whether all of your images are necessary. Removing unnecessary assets and photos helps reduce complexity and maintenance. Can an image be replaced with text or CSS (cascading style sheets, used to define styles in code)? Do you have a heavy animation that could be coded more efficiently or be removed? Prioritize your images and remove unnecessary, heavy content from your website when applicable.
  4. Use lazy loading techniques to prioritize loading the first available images in a limited view, while deferring off-screen images until the moment of need. Lazy loading allows all of the images “above the fold”, what’s instantly seen when a site loads, to be prioritized before images further down the page. Websites that only load images as they enter the user’s visible area and increase mobile page load times. Prioritizing images in the visible portion of the screen can help increase site speeds by up to 33%. Some companies have seen load times reduced to 3.5 seconds by using the lazy loading technique.

Additional Website Speed Optimization Tips

Image optimization remains one of the most effective ways to optimize your website for increased mobile loading speeds, but other improvements can also be made. Minimize landing page redirects and compress files to decrease mobile rendering time. Remove render-blocking javascript as well as redundant data that doesn’t impact how the page is processed by the browser.

Another important factor in creating a mobile-first website with fast page loading speeds comes in browser caching. Most of the static files used on a website can be saved on the computer or mobile device of your visitors for future access. Each time the visitor accesses a new page on your site, the files will be accessed via their computer instead of your server, which helps increase page load times. Using one of multiple cache mechanisms can greatly help improve your website performance and speed.

Make an Impression with a Mobile-First Website

Having a mobile-first website optimized for fast page load speeds can help multifamily marketers drive traffic, resulting in more leads, more conversions, and more revenue. The mobile web remains the most widely used platform for searchers to find their next apartment. By optimizing your images and taking advantage of browser caching you can provide a speedy, mobile-first experience for your users. Business growth requires a fast-loading mobile web experience in order to keep up with the expectations and demands of today’s savvy searchers.

Schedule a demo to see G5’s portfolio of mobile-first website designs.