6 Steps to Keep Mobile Holiday Shoppers Happy (and Buying)

How has mobile holiday shopping escalated? Very quickly and far beyond where it was several years ago. Today, one in five consumers will use their mobile device to shop while at work and school, and 15 percent will mobile shop while using the bathroom, according to the 2013 Compuware Professional Services Holiday Shopping Survey.

And while many have and will brave brick-and-mortar stores up until the end of the year, more than half of consumers would rather let their fingers do the shopping at home than deal with hordes of shoppers in-store. Indeed, it's a merry mobile holiday season.

Still, challenges arise for mobile shoppers. Slow-loading websites can prove a major headache. In fact, 20 percent of those surveyed prefer a traffic jam to a site loading at glacial pace. So, how can retailers keep mobile shoppers frustration-free during the frenetic final days of this year's holiday season (especially as a nasty Mother Nature makes it difficult to trek to stores)?

Here are six tips for retailers to ensure ideal mobile website performance during the most wonderful — and busy — time of the year:

1. Be ever-vigilant. Monitor, monitor, monitor. At the first signs of mobile website troubles, take immediate steps to ensure that your customers’ shopping experiences continue to be superior.

2. Cut the clutter. Keep your web pages as simple and clean as possible to avoid page-loading difficulties. The last thing a shopper wants to see is an "Error on Page" message. Reduce animation where possible. While it may catch a consumer's eye, to many users animation simply looks as if items are still loading. Animation only slows down the process.

3. Rely less on third parties. Many folks think third-party items load last, after the "good" content. But no such pattern really exists. The more nonuser-facing content you force through, the longer consumers must wait for the content that actually sells products. During the peak 2012 holiday shopping period, even properly delivered third-party tags generated errors as much as 17 percent of the time, BrightTag data showed.

4. Condense complex content containers. Simple, static content is best. The more you introduce rotating carousels or interactive elements, the slower and more unpredictable your pages will load. Complex designs call for more technology to make them work. A masthead image that's part of an interactive carousel can take five times longer to render than a single image.

5. Check your render order, lighten the load and repeat. Mobile web pages rarely render in the order you expect them to, thanks to erratic mobile browser behavior and the inconsistent speed of cellular connections. For instance, your page might request that social integration tags go in your footer after it requests that your good content appear up top. However, if the main content gets snagged on a slow connection thread, the browser can get preoccupied and render less important items first. The solution? Keep each page as light as possible.

6. Be flexible. Besides closely monitoring your mobile website, put a process in place to catch errors. You'll make multiple changes throughout the holiday season — e.g., fresh promotions will be added, prices will change — and changes can easily trigger errors. If you're proactive and catch errors early, it will be easier to find the source of the error.

Let this holiday season serve as a learning experience about mobile shopping. After it ends, evaluate how your mobile systems fared and what you can do better for next season because, well, planning for the 2014 holiday hustle and bustle begins shortly.

Robert Duross is a digital performance consultant at Compuware Professional Services, a technology solutions provider.