When things slowly become critical

More than 30 years after its invention, the Internet has long been mobile; but there are still websites that look on a smartphone as if Tim Berners-Lee himself had optimised them for his pilot and a 56k modem. This is incomprehensible for the ever-increasing number of people who do not sit down at a desk to "go online" - and is also directly penalised by Google with a poorer ranking.

In addition to the pure loading time, the response times to user input and scrolling behaviour are also evaluated, which can sometimes suffer under the weight of poor implementation, especially on mobile devices. In this case, "mobile first" in design does not only refer to the fact that something looks particularly good on a smartphone and that everything appears in the viewport at first glance. It is also important that everything runs smoothly, loads quickly and simply feels good.

Otherwise, users will quickly become frustrated and leave the website - a website that is designed and programmed "mobile first" but takes more than two seconds to load will test visitors' patience and encourage them to bounce. A website that is designed and tested for an optimised user experience but takes more than five seconds to become interactive also does not leave a good first impression and leads to a decrease in traffic and conversions. Google is now even going so far with its "mobile first" approach that it is kicking non-optimised websites out of the search results.

Slowly it becomes critical

Fortunately, you can influence the loading time of a website in a targeted manner if you follow a few simple rules and pay attention to the size of the website, the number of images and the quality of the hosting. It's that simple:

• Use clean code: It is best to avoid ready-made website templates with a maximum number of functions and programme them yourself. Clean programming only uses code that really makes sense, thereby keeping the source code and therefore the site as a whole lean.
  
• Avoid unnecessary plug-ins: Every plug-in eats up loading time and makes the website slower. This is all the more annoying if the plug-in is only part of a ready-made solution and is not actually needed.
  
• Optimise image files: Although high-resolution images are nice, they are absolutely unnecessary for use on screens and guarantee long loading times - especially on mobile devices. It is therefore essential to compress images and reduce them to the required size. Whether with Photoshop or TinyPNG, it doesn't matter.
  
• Use a content delivery network (CDN): A CDN distributes the files of a website to powerful servers all over the world. The page can then be loaded not only from one source, but simultaneously from several servers, depending on which server is close to the website visitor. The biggest advantage is a consistently fast loading time, regardless of the location of the target computer.
  
• Use fast servers: However, these servers should then also perform accordingly. To achieve this, it may make sense to invest a little more in hosting and rely on dedicated servers that are only used for a single project and are therefore correspondingly powerful.
  
• Use caching: With caching, the content of a web application is temporarily stored during the visit. This allows the website or application to load faster when you visit it again.
  
• Reduce the number of HTTP requests: The number of HTTP requests can be easily reduced by merging several files into a single file.