Mobile Internet traffic is set to overtake desktop and laptop traffic this year according to emarketer. The reason is that mobile technology is fast becoming ubiquitous. When almost everyone carries around a device with Internet access, the chances are good they will use it for that purpose. While a small screen size is something of a hindrance, one eventually gets used to it.
Mobile Internet access simplifies life when you can order something online while you are thinking about it rather than making a note to purchase the item when you get back home to your desktop. Doing something now rather than later also makes you a more effective employee or businessperson. An Internet accessible mobile device lets you quickly respond to a need regardless of your immediate situation. Many people find they have no use for a desktop and prefer not to spend money on one. These are just a few of the reasons for the rise of mobile Internet traffic.
Mobile Responsiveness Is Necessary But Not Sufficient
Although two prolific consumers, moms and millennials, use mobile devices to make their purchases, the truth is that everyone is gradually getting more comfortable using their devices for online purchases. Businesses with a web presence are responding to this change by making their sites mobile responsive. However, a responsive website is of little use if your mobile traffic doesn’t stick around because your website loads too slowly. A responsive site merely adjusts itself to accommodate the screens of different viewing devices. It doesn’t speed up your site.
A fast website is especially important with mobile traffic because websites take longer to load on those devices. Interaction between the mobile device and the server hosting your website must always take place through a cell tower. This interfacing with the cell tower adds additional waiting time on top of server related time lags.
To ensure you don’t lose sales because of this, it’s imperative that your website or ecommerce store be designed with performance in mind. However, before doing this, make sure that your server isn’t part of your performance problem. Publish a simple web page that makes few resource demands. That would mean a simple page with text and a small image without sidebars full of resource hungry components. If you are using a content management system, make minimal use of plugins. You may want to set up a subdomain for this test so that your primary site is unaffected by your minimal plugin use.
After publishing the test page, use a service to monitor its loading time. If you find that the page loads slowly on occasion, then your problem is an intermittently slow server. Sometimes it’s fast but other times it’s sluggish. This is not a suitable server to host your business site. If your primary site is sometimes slow and you aren’t using excessive resources, then again, your server isn’t up to the task and it’s time to look for better server hosting. If this is the case, please contact us to learn about our services.
