Improving Mobile Site Performance

Has this ever happened to you? You tap a link on your mobile device, only to have the website take so long to load, you leave before you even see it. You’re not the only one. As many as 40 percent of website visitors abandon a site at 3 seconds of delay. People are spending more and more time on mobile—consuming content, interacting with businesses and making purchases. However, since it’s a relatively new channel, many businesses haven’t optimized their website for mobile yet and still have very slow loading times. This can lead to negative experiences for people, and problems for businesses such as site abandonment, missed business objectives and inaccurate measurement. That’s why Facebook is sharing tips and investing in solutions to help businesses optimize their websites for mobile.

Great mobile experiences bring value to both people and businesses

Nobody wants to wait ages for a website to load. A better mobile experience helps businesses form a stronger connection with the people interested in them. Plus, site abandonment hurts business objectives, like completing a purchase or filling out a form. It can also bring challenges to measurement—people often abandon sites before third-party site analytics have time to register a page visit. This can make it harder to track and optimize ad performance.

“MMA’s research shows a competitive advantage for marketers who aggressively move to mobile, but poor ‘click to site/app’ experiences limit that advantage. We’ll continue to work with the industry to ensure people have positive mobile experiences and marketers capture maximum value. ” — Greg Stuart, CEO of the Mobile Marketing Association

Businesses can take steps to improve website load time

There are a number of things businesses can do to help ensure the best possible mobile experience for people. Site load times can be affected by numerous factors, including quality of connectivity, whether or not the site is optimized for mobile and the website’s server. Business can optimize their sites for mobile by:
  • Minimizing landing page redirects, plugins and link shorteners
  • Compressing files to decrease mobile rendering time
  • Improving server response time by utilizing multi-region hosting
  • Using a high-quality Content Delivery Network to reach audiences quickly
  • Removing render-blocking javascript
    • Learn more ways to improve mobile site performance.

    Mobile-optimized solutions already on Facebook

    A few of the solutions we’ve built to help businesses create mobile-optimized experiences for people include Canvas, Pages and in-app browsing capabilities. Canvas is a mobile ad experience within Facebook that enables businesses to share their stories in a beautiful, immersive way. And it loads quickly, as much as 10 times faster than standard mobile web. Pages are a great way for small businesses to build a presence online and on mobile. Businesses can use their Pages to share what they’re all about and what they have to offer, and also communicate directly with their customers through Facebook. We also feature an in-app browser, which means when people click to websites within the Facebook app, they can load and browse the site without having to leave Facebook. This greatly improves the mobile site load time and the experience.

    Announcing Facebook updates for better mobile experiences

    Our goal is to improve user experience by helping businesses be the best mobile advertisers they can be, so we’re always developing new tools and insights to improve mobile experience. Today, we’re introducing prefetching—pre-loading mobile content in the Facebook in-app browser before a link is tapped. This can shorten mobile site load time by 29 percent or 8.5 seconds, improving the experience and decreasing the risk of site abandonment. Learn more about prefetching especially if you use third party tag-based measurement. Over the coming months, we’re working to improve ad experiences for people by considering website performance and a person’s network connection in our ad auction and delivery system. In this way, we can better match ads to the moments when people can best engage with content. Helping to ensure the best ad experiences on mobile is key to providing value for both people and businesses on Facebook.

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