Optimizing Your International Mobile Performance

However, another reason is that certain countries are not equipped with the best technology. So, the interface and functionality of your platform might get affected in certain regions even after you optimize it for low screen resolutions or low bandwidth. Therefore, keeping in mind the possibility of general technological challenges in third world countries during optimization is also essential.

Regardless, it is always beneficial to optimize your platform for smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices. These generally have a more limited bandwidth than a typical laptop or desktop. In this article, we talk about some of the things you can do to make sure your international eCommerce platform is mobile-friendly.

Site Loading Speed

Mobile optimization does not only involve the presentation. It also includes the load speed and overall performance.

The only way to improve the loading speed of your platform is through testing. You need to go through performance testing and validation. It is always the most straightforward alterations that can make a massive difference to your platform’s performance on mobile devices in remote regions.

Comparing Cloud vs. CDNs

When there is traffic coming from international locations, the typical hosting scenario involves a single host or a cluster in a single environment. Cloud infrastructure can then propagate the data.

Let’s say you have just started expanding your eCommerce business internationally. The headquarters, as well as the hosting, is based in the U.S. Ultimately, your international customers will have to reach the U.S. server to access your eCommerce platform. When there is only one locale, the global latency can be pretty high. Every request has to travel to the U.S. server and back, so a delay occurs just due to latency, and it grows the farther the customer is from the server.

Latency refers to the delay in communication between the user’s browser and the webserver. Essentially, it is the time taken to request data and get a response from the servers. It is not necessarily the same as the load time of a platform.

Content delivery networks or CDNs can help businesses without enough resources to set up a cloud infrastructure. They are a globally distributed network of web servers. The best part, they cost significantly less than the cloud.

CDNs can house the core components of a platform. These include the images, script files, CSS files, etc. All of these are cached. The information is then cast through data centers that are the nearest from where the request is originating.

You can say that content delivery networks serve as a “broker” to this cache data before the server gets that request. So the data is somewhere in between a user’s browser and the webserver. When the browser requests for the data, the content delivery network will quickly give it to the end-user from a local data center.

Ultimately, the benefit of content delivery networks is that the end-user gets instant results. Since the local data center is closer to its location, it ensures a better experience. Thus, CDNs can be helpful for mobile optimization as no re-downloading of big files is required. They do not have to wait for latency since files are not coming from far-off locations. Even if there is a slow connection, at least they will not have to wait for the files to load forever. It can be a huge deal to have to wait multiple seconds before the site loads. Some users might find it off-putting enough to leave the site.