In 2013, an average mobile website took an excruciating 7 seconds to fully load. 40% of potential clients will leave if site loading requires more than 3 seconds. Google wants to get that number down to under a second, and thankfully they provide tons of tips and tools to help us achieve that.

First of all, your company must have a mobile presence. Smartphone usage is increasing, and is only going to be more widespread. Users will learn to avoid slow sites, so the sooner you speed up your mobile page, the better.

People from all around the world will be reaching your site with different tablets, phones, and browsers, so install a responsive design for an optimal viewing experience across all formats. This provides easier navigation and user control, with limited resizing, panning, and scrolling. Also no redirection is necessary, which will reduce loading time.

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As the above picture shows, you have no control over the 600 milliseconds required for DNS lookup, TCP connection, and HTTP request and response time. You do, however, have control over the next 400 milliseconds of server response time and client side rendering.

You want to at least have your above-the-fold content appear in milliseconds rather than seconds. That way, the user can be engaged while the rest of the site loads. Google suggests performing the following to hit the goal of sub-second website rendering time:

• Server must render the response – Server response time is how long it takes for a server to return the HTML
• Number of redirects should be minimized – Ideally, you should eliminate redirects entirely. Avoid m.website.com redirects.
• Number of roundtrips to first render should be minimized – It is important to optimize content to minimize the number of roundtrips required to deliver the data needed to perform the first render of the page.
• Avoid external blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content – You want to reduce the amount of network round trips, so remove any external scripts that must be downloaded, which add another network round trip.
• Reserve time for browser layout and rendering – The process of parsing HTML, CSS, and executing JavaScript can take up to 200 milliseconds depending on the complexity of the page.
• Optimize JavaScript execution and rendering time – Complicated scripts and code can take hundreds of milliseconds to execute properly.

I come bearing good news: Many of these practices can be automated. There are plenty of open source performance optimization tools that can help your site get speedier. Google even has some products that automatically optimize your mobile sites resources.

When you’ve finished tinkering around, test your mobile page and check your improvements with the PageSpeed Insights tool.

Speaking of speedy, have you met HostDime’s new client CORE panel? HostDime upgraded to an HTML, CSS, and JavaScript application, making your mobile experience more efficient, aesthetically pleasing, and best of all, noticeably faster.

Simply enter core.hostdime.com into your mobile browser and you are ready to transfer hosting accounts, answer tickets, start a live chat, pay invoices, and so much more all from your smartphone.

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This article was written HostDime’s Content Strategist Jared Smith.