Mobile Speed Is Important

Last week I did a post on The Need For Mobile Speed. Over the weekend I used the points in that post to increase the mobile speed of three more of my blogs. Those blogs were my Buy Online Lotto Tickets, Get Online Lottery and A Loving Memorial. While it was easier having a template to follow I found that different sites have different hurdles to jump. I persevered all the same because mobile speed is important!

Why Mobile Speed Is Important

As I mentioned in my previous post my latest need for mobile speed was brought on by my good mate Mitch’s post. You’ll find links to his exceptional posts about his search for improving mobile speed in my previous post. Mobile speed is important to me because I need to keep Google happy in order to get a good listing in their search engines.

Having to please Google now makes me laugh with the knowledge of previous posts such as Google Sucks and Does Google Control Your Blog. There are a whole lot of other posts where I have a go at Google but this one is about why mobile speed is important not about Google’s many failings.

mobile speed is important to googlemobile-speed-important to customers

As you can see, the results were not as good as my easy Sports Betting blog but it was the best I could do. I’m more than happy that everything was in the green.

Apart from keeping Google happy mobile speed is important if you’re at all interested in making money online. This is because, and Google knows this, more and more people are accessing the internet via their smart phones. I think you will find this article on mobile marketing statistics very interesting. If a site is too sluggish people these days won’t wait to let it load. They’re going to look elsewhere and those sites that haven’t bothered with mobile speed miss out. Better for the rest of us right?  :drunk_tb:

Hosting Is Important For Mobile Speed

importance-of-mobile-speed importance-of-mobile-speed2

Once again, while there is a vast improvement, its still not as good as my sports site. I played around with settings for ages and then it hit me. They’re hosted on a shared hosting site whereas my sports betting blog is hosted with Inmotion hosting, a VPS host!

One of the problems I was having with these two blogs was that the leverage caching wasn’t working. This is something that my caching plugin handle so well previously. After a lot of wall banging  :wallbash_tb: I contacted support and they were kind enough to edit my .htaccess file. Thanks to all the guys at Greengeeks.

Mobile Speed Is Affected By Plugins

You may not know this but too many plugins or the wrong plugins can really affect your speed. Some plugins are so poorly designed that having them activated can slow down your blog to a virtual crawl. On the other hand, some plugins, like caching plugins, are essential for mobile speed. Another plugin I found that improved the mobile speed of some of my blogs is Widget Options. This plugin allowed me to select which widgets showed up when the blog was accessed by a mobile user. You can even select whether they showed up on the home page for desktop users. This way you also speed up your home page.

speed-up-blogs

make your blog faster

As you can see the results for my Loving Memorial blog was exceptional. While this blog was also hosted on Greengeeks it has the least amount of plugins installed which simply proves my last point.

Did I mention the importance of themes at all? I should have because the theme you’re using may be what is slowing you down.

 

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The Need For Mobile Speed

Improving Mobile Speed

mobile speedMobile Speed is important! As much as it pains me to say this, if we want to get more traffic we need to keep Google happy. Failing this would cause us to lose our standing in the search engine causing a huge drop in traffic resulting in less income. And we don’t want that do we.

I’ve written several posts on how to boost the speed of your WordPress blog. One of the later ones was when I moved to Inmotion Hosting a VPS host because a shared hosting was just too slow. That post was called WassupBlog Now Hosted On A VPS Host. Yeah, I come up with some killer titles :tongue_laugh_ee:

I followed that post with How To Optimize Your WordPress Blog. Although I would have been more than happy to leave it at that I happened to come across one of Mitch’s Mobile Friendly vs Mobile-Speed post. I already knew my blogs are mobile friendly because I use Flexsqueeze. I assumed that the mobile speed would be the same as the desktop speed but alas, this is not the case.

This post is about increasing the mobile speed of my Best Online Sports Betting blog. Unfortunately I didn’t take a screen shot of the results before I started updating the mobile speed of that blog but I did leave a comment on Mitch’s post and it was 60. The image below shows the current speed after all my tweaking.

need for speed mobile

Pretty good huh? You can see how your site scores by clicking this link.

How To Improve Your Mobile Speed

The first thing you need to do is to find out what Google thinks is hampering your mobile speed. You do this by using Google’s Page Speed Insight tool. That will score your site as well as tell you what’s wrong with it and what you need to do to make it better. The order you tackle that is up to you. I decided to tackle the easy things first.

Optimize Images

This came under the ‘Consider Fixing’ category. I was surprised to see that because I thought all my images were optimized because I use the EWWW Image Optimizer
 plugin.

The good thing about Googles Speed Insight tool is that it actually shows you what needs to be fixed. In the case of the images it gives you actual links to those images. A lot of my images were images used in my theme. I downloaded one directory at a time, optimized all the images in that directory using TinyPNG and then uploaded it back to the server. That increased my mobile speed a little.

Unfortunately a lot of those images were from my affiliate sites which I had  no control over. Why they don’t use optimized images is beyond me. I decided to host all those images myself  and my speed increased a little more once I optimized them.

Leverage Browser Caching

Once I fixed the Optimize images problem I tackled the the leverage browser caching issue. I thought that was being handled by my Comet my caching plugin but it seemed it was falling somewhat short so I decided to try a different one. Enter WP Fastest Cache. That improved it a little more but created a .css issue. Still, the speed was improved. They had a paid premium version with a mobile function so I decided what the heck and bought it. Another speed increase.

Again some of the stuff was out of my control because they were being caused externally via affiliate links etc. Wherever I could I tried to resolve those issues resulting in another speed increase.

Minify JavaScript

Where the caching plugin could fix the JavaScript found on my blog it can’t fix external JavaScript which once again was coming from affiliate links. They use JavaScript in order to keep a record of stats. I decided speed was more important than stats so I opted for simple affiliate links.

Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content: A lot of this was taken care of by WP Fastest Cache but like I said earlier it created a couple of internal .css issued. The solution was installing another plugin, Autoptimize. After a lot of tweaking of that plugin I got the results you see in the image above.

The only things I couldn’t resolve were under the leverage browser caching;

http://w.sharethis.com/button/st_insights.js (expiration not specified)
http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js (20 minutes)
http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js (2 hours)

I could easily fix the first two by removing the Simple Share Button Adder but I decided the potential shares were more important than the small speed increase. As for the Google analytics issue, you would have thought that Google would have chosen to ignore that seeing as how they were causing it in the first place right? :wallbash_tb:

Google Fonts issue: My issue with Google Fonts, which is apparently built into WP, was a bit of a pain. Luckily Autoptimize was able to resolve that for me as well.

WP Speed and .htaccess: In your search for mobile speed you will probably come across a lot of sites that tell you to change your .htaccess file to allow for gzip compression or whatever. Your caching plugin should do that for you. I didn’t have to change mine at all.

As I said at the beginning of the post, all this came about because of my mate Mitch. I linked to the first of his quest for speed in the beginning of this post. You may also like to read The Quest For  Mobile-Speed Two and the Quest For Mobile-Speed Three.

What’s the mobile speed of your site like?

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AliExpress Stores Review Update

Yep, it’s time for an AliExpress Stores review. That’s even though I first introduced you to them last week! That was when I wrote about the Xpress Stores Pro plugin and how it helped me to create 4 of my very own online stores. You can read that post here. That post also had a video showing you just how easy it is to create those stores. Naturally the post also has links to my online stores. Even if you did happen to check out those stores I’d have another look because tanks to FlexSqueeze2 I’ve made some minor adjustments and they look even better.  :whistle:

AliExpress Stores Review And Progress Update

AliExpress Stores Review

Yep, only a week and I’ve made my first ever sale! So, what did I sell, I’m so glad you asked.  :tongue_laugh_ee:

AliExpress Stores Review 2

That link takes you to the smart band bracelet I wrote about in this post. It wasn’t that post that sold it though as I wrote that after the sale. To my best knowledge this is the sales page that sold the smart band bracelet, which was probably accessed from the smart wristbands product page.

It took me over a year to make my first sale with Amazon and apart from stuff I’ve personally sold I’ve never made any money on eBay. Probably would have helped if I had an eBay store. :wink_ee: So, to get an almost instant sale from my first ever online store I think is pretty impressive.

Naturally it could have been a fluke, but it’s been my experience that flukes rarely happen in the online sales world.

What I have to do now is to promote those stores. and I reckon the best way to generate more interest. I’m hoping by writing more posts about products for sale in those stores linking to those products is the way to go. Just like the one I linked to in this post. Hopefully Google and other search engines will also pick up on those posts and start sending more traffic to my stores.`

 

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