The Google Breakfast Briefing on Friday September 1st 2017 was on “The Mobile Revolution”, based around the premise that in today’s connected world “we don’t go on mobile, we live on mobile”
As is normal with Google’s Breakfast Briefings, some interesting statistics were shown at the start to (A) highlight the how far mobile devices have made inroads into the market and (B) to show what users expect when using their mobiles to connect to sites.
(A) Mobile Ad Spending in Ireland
Currently, in 2017, adspend on mobile is estimated to be around US$297 million (approx. €250 million) and accounts for 62% of all digital adspend. However, by 2021, this will have increased dramatically, when it is estimated to reach US$495 million (approx. €415 million) and account for almost 80% of all digital spend.
(B) Mobile users want speed
All users basically want faster downloads – 53% of users will abandon a site if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. 47% expect a page to load in under 2 seconds and 52% indicate that a fast load time is important to brand loyalty. As mobile site speed is so critical to a positive user experience, the 5 main culprits for slowing load times to check are:
Images: these can account for 63% of page weight –Google’s recommendation is to compress all images.
Page Resource Requests: almost 20% of pages have 100 or more resource requests, so reducing server response time is key.
Java Script: JS script use is intensifying. So try limit JS script to key pages where possible
Custom Fonts: 50% of mobile pages use custom fonts, which should be disabled on mobile sites.
Redirects: 20% of pages have 5 or more redirects.
To check you site’s mobile speed, click on this link https://testmysite.withgoogle.com/intl/en-gb and enter your website’s URL to get the results.
There are a number of new recent developments which can help in the page speed area. One is Google’s Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP) which is an open source initiative that aims to provide mobile optimized content that can load instantly everywhere. Some WordPress plugins have been developed to install and run AMP.
