Now, more than ever, user expectations are at an all-time high.
People abandon websites and platforms that load too slowly, don’t have a good mobile experience, are confusing to navigate, or are inundated with advertisements, among other reasons.
In order to stay competitive and offer the best user experience possible, you need to keep those aspects at the front of your mind when trying to meet your users’ expectations and introduce new features.
If you want to seek the help of an established team, you can work with a company like Digivante to conduct functionality testing, live monitoring, and other usability testing to see exactly how your platform performs and how users interact with it. This will give you a clear understanding of any problem areas that need addressing.
If you want to tackle it yourself, here are the key areas to focus on in order to improve your publishing platform’s performance.
Focus on the mobile experience
Mobile reading habits are growing and have begun to dominate the statistics. The number of adults who used mobile devices to read the news jumped from 54% to 85% in just four years. That means more than eight in ten U.S. adults use their mobile devices to get their news. As the number continues to grow, it’s becoming increasingly important for publishing platforms to cater their user experience to mobile users.
Ensure your platform is responsive and works well on mobile. You can implement server-side device detection for mobile users as well, so your platform knows which version to show the reader at the server level, rather than requesting it from the device.
This can also improve page speed, as it prevents your desktop-sized assets from rendering onto a mobile device. It also makes it easier for the page to load because it won’t need to adjust the layout from desktop to mobile.
Make sure it loads quickly
Your platform’s loading speed is critical to how it performs. Users demand a high-speed performance and will leave if it takes too long. Anything over two seconds is determined as “too slow” and Google has even set the threshold on mobile to under one second. Users have become accustomed to quick load times and will almost immediately reject any slow loading experiences. In fact, 53% of mobile users will leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load.
You can start by conducting a speed test to see how quickly your platform loads on a 3G connection (even though most networks are running on 4G now, there are still enough globally that will run on 3G until 2020 to make it worth testing). Once you’ve got an idea of how much you need to improve, you can start making adjustments.
Optimizing all the assets on the page can be a low-hanging fruit in terms of speeding up your loading time. Often, large images will be downloaded from a stock photography site and immediately uploaded to the server without any optimization for web, so check your file sizes on your images and run them through an optimizer. You can also compress typographies with compression algorithms and formats to reduce their size.
Furthermore, ensure that your bandwidth is reserved for a smooth on-screen experience with lazy loading, embedding media assets as the user scrolls, rather than loading them all at once.
This makes the page load quicker and the overall performance better.
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— Will Corry (@slievemore) April 10, 2019