How to Ensure Your Mobile Web Site is Speedy
In today’s must-have-it-yesterday world, our attention spans are minuscule. It’s crazy to think back to life without the Internet (if you’re old enough to remember those archaic living conditions.) We used to get information by driving to a library or thumbing through a phone book. We used to have to get into our cars and drive to a brick-and-mortar store to shop … or, snail mail an order form from mail-order catalogs.
Today we can do all of that from a device that fits into the palm of our hand. What do we possibly have to complain about? Well, we’ve gotten spoiled. We can and do complain if a website takes, say, 5 SECONDS to load. For most of us, waiting extra seconds is so frustrating that we may give up entirely and find a different website that doesn’t make us endure that agonizing wait. If you’ve got a business website and it’s not lightning fast, you’re alienating your customers. And just as bad, you’re alienating search engines. If you want your business to jump to the top of the SEO list, you need your mobile site to be speedy. Google penalizes those that are not.
AMP It Up
If you can’t confidently state that your website is super fast, you need to do something. Specifically, you need to check out a technology called Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) that exists to load your web page crazy fast on mobile devices. It’s open source, so any web developer can use it. In fact, if your site is hosted on WordPress, you just install a free plugin. Once you install and activate that, you can make your pages speedier by adding “/amp/” at the end of a permalink. It’s that easy!
There’s no point in having a business website if it’s not entirely user-friendly. It not only needs to be mobile-device compatible, its load speed needs to be almost instantaneous. If you haven’t installed AMP, don’t wait a second longer!
