Tips for Optimizing Your Site for Multiple Browsers and Devices

Today, everything is becoming more fast-paced. We look forward to faster things that save our time. In today’s world where everyone is struggling for speed, time is money, and a slow website it is nothing more than poison to your business. A slow loading website can turn away your users and sometimes for good too. From a study by unbounce, 79% of people tend to not return for buying anything if they face trouble while a website loads. If that’s the case, optimization of a website is not just necessary, it is mandatory!

When it comes to various mobiles and devices, it becomes mandatory as it not just about page load time; website optimization is about a seamless and flawless experience to users on all mobile browsers and devices.

In this mobile-first world, optimization of a website for mobile devices comes at the top as more than 50% of the website traffic comes from mobile and if they face issues while loading your website on mobile then again they will leave it for good. Almost 73% of mobile users have encountered websites that take too long to load and even a delay of 100ms in your website's load time can cause your conversion rate to drop by 9%. 

1. Choose a Reliable Web Host

The first and foremost thing that comes into mind is selecting website hosting services when you decide to move your businessonline. Selecting the right web host for your website has a great effect on your website load speed, user experience, Google search ranking, and overall traffic on your website.

You need to take care of following things while selecting a suitable web host for your website.

Your Website Space Requirement

What type of website are you are going to build? Is this something like a heavy e-commerce website or a simple blog? How much disk space your website is going to consume is one of the major concerns while selecting a web hosting service. A memory disk is required to store media files, codes and database while hosting a website. Park your time to give a thorough analysis of memory storage and select web host as per your website requirements.

Overall Traffic Load

Website performance is directly proportional to the traffic load on your website. When any user accesses any file on your website, bandwidth comes into the picture. All the web hosting companies provide unlimited bandwidth but website performance is influenced by the number of users accessing your website at a time.

Server Reliability/Uptime Scores

Web host server reliability is one of the major factors to consider while selecting a web host. You need a 24x7 working web host with more than 99.5% uptime score.

Pricing for Hosting During Signup and Renewal

Web hosting services companies, specifically shared hosting, offer very cheap services when you sign up, but charges may fly high on renewals. So beware when selecting a web host service and make a pocket-friendly deal as well.

Technical Support

If you are new to online website hosting, technical support will be your lifeline every time you need any assistance. You need to comprehensively check technical documentation of the web host company. Read reviews and available information for customer support before choosing the right web host for your website.

You can choose from some of the top hosting companies across the globe like GoDaddy, HostGator, BlueHost, Amazon Web Services (AWS), or Google Cloud Platform.

2. Test Your Website for Cross-Browser and Cross-Device Compatibility Issues

This is a must before and after launching your website for public access. People are using various browsers, operating systems, and more than 3,000 web-enabled devices to access any website across the globe. With 1.94 billion websites in the world in competition, you must assure your website will look as expected in all the devices for great experience.

3. Follow a Mobile-First Approach

A mobile-first approach is trending in the tech world. You have to make sure your website is perfectly working aross all the mobile and tablet device of different viewports and resolutions. Before moving further, you need to verify whether your website is mobile-friendly or not and check the responsiveness of your website. You can test your website using Google’s Mobile-Friendly tool and find out the area where you need to do some improvements for better user experience and make your website mobile friendly.

And if you are running any blog or lightweight website you can use WordPress’s Responsive themes for seamless user experience.

4. Improve Your Site’s Loading Times

Website load speed is the main factor to get the attention of users for the first time. As research says, users expect to access your page in two seconds and after if your web page takes three seconds, 42% of users leave your site and move on. Make sure to have the faster loading speed of web pages on mobile devices as users expect your website to load in mobile browser faster than in desktop browsers.

Some of the factors which may help you improve your site’s speed:

• Implement browser caching

• Minimize HTTP requests

• Minify and combine files

• Use asynchronous loading for CSS and JavaScript files

• Optimize server response time

• Optimize CSS delivery

• Reduce the number of redirects

5. Enable Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

If you have enough number of mobile users for your website, you should have be asking, “Is my website mobile friendly?”

You should implement AMP for your website started by Google to ensure a smoother experience for mobile surfing. Accelerated mobile pages are a mobile-friendly version of your website and it involves the process of compressing the content and removing unnecessary files and graphics for faster loading of website on mobile browsers.

If you want to optimize your website, AMP is a must in 2019 to not get your audience diverted to other sites due to website performance. You can start making your own AMP pages using WordPress plugin.

6. Redesign Your Pop-Ups

Putting pop-ups on the website is one of the best methods to increase conversions and share any new website update to users. However, the placing of pop-ups is very critical as per user experience point of view. You need to make a strategy around where to place pop-ups, content, and images in the pop-up to grab the user attention not to annoy them.

Also, all pop-ups are not good for the mobile-first approach. Pop-ups seem bigger in small screens of mobile and tablet devices, which eventually affect user experience and leave a bad impression on users.

To confine pop-ups that are detrimental for user experience, Google recently implemented pop-up penalties. This contains rules and instructions to follow while setting up pop-ups for mobile users to avoid bad user experience.

7. Use CDN for Website Resources

A user can experience low website performance due to heavy requests hitting web host server or users that are far away from the web host server. Too many requests on a host server may result to load files slowly and ultimately poor performance.

With aweb host server, you can use a Content delivery network (CDN) to get rid of all the performance and latency issues. With CDN, you can cache your website on the global network of servers containing copies of your web files. When a user accessing your website and browser requests for a file, then that request is routed to the closest server.

For example, if your web host server is in Germany and a user from California is accessing your website, his web browser will fetch all the necessary files from nearby servers.

CDN can help to speed up the load speed of your website and optimize for all the users across the globe. MaxCDN and Cloudflare are the best options to start with CDN.

8. Image Optimization

Sometimes, images on your website are very large files and they can play an important role in the load speed of your webpages. Make sure to have compressed images on your website to fasten the image loading. You can use Compressor to compress your image files.

The other thing is to make sure to use an appropriate image file type for every image on the website. This seems a little thing to consider but file type can affect file size and ultimately image load time.

Conclusion

Optimization of your site for mobile and multiple browsers add to your user experience. With the help of these tips, you can optimize your site for various browsers and devices. Please let me know in the comments if you are using any other specific technique to optimize your website. Suggestions are always appreciated.