Plan the Content for Your Website: Using Images and Videos

In the Mobile Era, it is vital that your website loads quickly on mobile devices such as smartphone and tablets.  There are a number of factors that you need to take into account when preparing the content for your website.

Load Time

How quickly your website loads on a mobile device is imperative to attracting visitors to your website.  If it takes more than a few seconds then your potential customer will simply move on to the next website (probably your competitor).  In order for your website to load quickly, you need to ensure that the content on your website such as images and videos doesn't impact on the load time.

Using Images

The main problem most website owners face when it comes to images, is that the size of the images are so large it takes a lot of time to download them.  This is especially true if you have a lot of images on the page, such as in a gallery of images or if it's an ecommerce site with lots of product images.

You can combat this problem by ensuring that the images you use are compressed for use on the web.  This doesn't mean that you have to loss quality of the image, simply that it is compressed so that the size of the image enables it to be loaded faster.

The easiest way to do this is to use an online tool such as https://imagify.io.  This is an online site that allows you to upload an image from your PC and then download the compressed image for use on your website.

Using Videos

As you can probably appreciate, downloading one video can take quite some time due to the file size.  In the same way that images which are too large can impact on the loading time, videos are a big culprit.

We would recommend that the use of videos, is limited on your website and if you must use them, then don't place any on your homepage, so that the website loads quickly.

An important factor when testing the load times on mobile devices is to remember that when you are creating your website you will either be in an office or home and connected to the WiFi there.  In these circumstances the load time will be fine.  You need to test the load time using your Mobile Data and in various locations so that in areas with poor internet connection people can still load your website in a timely manner.

The MobilERA Platform enables you to set different widgets to appear on desktop or mobile.  This means that you can set a widget with an image to appear on the mobile version and another widget containing a video to display on the desktop version.  This adaptive technology is at the forefront of our Platform.