If you don’t have a mobile-friendly website, then you’re losing so much traffic to your competitors. The world has gradually adopted mobile devices as the first line of communication and research, so anyone who wants to learn about you or your business first searches about you – and many of them use their mobile devices.
Statista believes that mobile accounts for approximately half of the web traffic worldwide. In the third quarter of 2020, mobile devices generated 50.81% of global website traffic, consistently hovering around the 50% mark since the beginning of 2017.
These data communicate the heightened importance of having a mobile-friendly website. Apart from the huge traffic you can get, there is so much more optimizing your website for mobile can do for you. So, this is the core conversation in this article, much attention will be given to how mobile optimization has strengthened.
How Do I Know If My Website is Mobile-Friendly?
If you have a new website, then the chances of your website are optimized for mobile is great. However, you need to run a complete check to be extra sure your website is mobile-friendly.
Google has a mobile-friendly testing tool. In using this tool, you only need to input the URL of your website and it will run an automatic check. Apart from getting an answer on the mobile-friendliness of your website, you will receive a screenshot of how your page pops on a smartphone screen and a list of recommendations to improve the overall mobile experience.
If the tool signals your website needs a lot of work, then you need to pay key attention to the problems and create top-notch solutions for each of them. By executing this, you improve your website’s visibility in the search engines, ensure more of your visitors stick around and improve conversions on your site.
Alternatively, if you get an excellent report, then you don’t need to prioritize updating your website. But never stop considering ways to improve the mobile experience of your users.
10 Tips for Developing a Fantastic Mobile-Friendly Website
When you want to develop a mobile-friendly website, you need to follow the right steps so you don’t cause irrecoverable damage to your website. Some of the tips you should follow include:
1. Choose Mobile Responsive Template
Building a responsive website is the best way to create a site that functions effectively and optimally across mobile and desktop. All designers believe this because a responsive website contains every content and information you can access through all your devices, but the site aligns to portray itself depending on the device used in displaying it.
For example, when you visit LinkedIn with your mobile device, you get to access a page that portrays the key features of the platform with most of the icons on the bottom end of the screen. When you use your desktop to view this same website, the interphase is bigger as you can see jobs, opportunities and so much more on the same homepage screen.
With a quality, responsive design, you can make your website mobile-friendly without limiting the information your mobile visitors can access—they still get all the same content the rest of your visitors do. And responsive design is also good for SEO. Google directly recommends it.
Even if you don’t know how to build a responsive website, that’s not really a problem as you can access a lot of resource tools to help you. And even when those tools don’t give you what you really desire, then you can take the next big step.
2. Apply Shorter Paragraphs and Sentences
Reading on large devices has been difficult, and when you now bring a smaller device and fill a paragraph with chunks of text, you worsen the case.
Even Readable believes simply shortening the length of your sentences will lead to the most impressive effect on the readability score.
Instead of using long paragraphs, break them into brief paragraphs and try to keep your sentences below twenty words. Even if you’re still going on a train of thought, you can create a divergence to continue it on a new paragraph.
3. Use Light Images
A light website is vital when you want it to be mobile-friendly. Because almost every website has plugins and files that have some weight, they can pull down the website speed and make it very difficult for mobile users who would experience a slow loading time.
Google strongly believes that website speed is a vital ranking factor. The Search team announced speed would be a ranking signal for desktop searches in 2010 and as of (July 2018), page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches too. Well, we’ve seen how accelerated mobile pages take stronger priority compared to others.
When it comes to mobile, this is so vital. If you’ve ever tried to load a webpage somewhere remote, the slow loading time can be so frustrating, You might wait for up to a minute for a single page to load and you might just give up your goal.
4. Avoid Flash
According to CMN, FLASH is a bandwidth-friendly and browser-independent vector-graphic animation technology. There are benefits to using websites developed in FLASH and several drawbacks that can influence a person’s ability to surf the web pages effectively.
Flash creates an interesting animation design for a website, but with more emphasis on functionality and little on design, you need to investigate how using a FLASH is really important.
Apart from the fact that search engine bots can not read flash pages, they make surfing through a website difficult for any user. For example, when you visit a flash website and you click a certain button if you want to return to the previous page and you press “back”, the flash functionality doesn’t support such a move.
5. Use Buttons Carefully
Large buttons might not look aesthetically correct for a designer. So, the next line of action would be to reduce the size of the button tremendously. However, when a user cannot press a button on your website using his mobile phone, it reduces the rating of your user experience by a huge margin.
To eliminate this problem, you simply have to adopt using big buttons. You might not love the look they give to your website, however, functionality always trumps design every time. UX planet completely agrees that button size should reflect the priority of this element on the screen. A large button means more important action.
So, when building a mobile-friendly website, you must ensure all your buttons are shaped correctly and work optimally. Ensure that these buttons execute the same function across both mobile and desktop, but ensure they’re visible as well.
6. Distribute Your Links
Internal linking is important for your website when you want to increase dwell time and reduce bounce rate. However, when running links, most SEO content creators make the mistake of linking only a word and when a mobile visitor sees this link, it is difficult for the visitor to click the link.
Another core problem with links is when you click to a website that is not mobile friendly. When you link to this website, it will make the visitor lose truth in you because you connected them to an inefficient place.
7. Use Large Readable Fonts
Since most people use their mobile phones to access your website, ensure they can fulfill their goal and this will involve following certain instructions. However, how can a visitor transit from page to page without reading through? It makes little sense.
Using small fonts on your website will cause a poor experience for every user. You should use a font size of at least 14px on your webpages, however, you can still investigate the type of font and size that will be readable and won’t cripple other functionalities on your website.
It’s also best to stick with standard fonts. Any font your visitor’s browser would need to download will slow down how long it takes your website to load, which is not a good mobile experience.
8. Eliminate Unnecessary Pop-ups
As a website owner, monetizing your website is a serious priority to you and that’s understandable. However, when you advertise to the detriment of user experience, visitors will stop visiting your website as they’ll seek other options.
Ad pop-ups on your website can stress any visitor, especially when they don’t know how to remove the pop-up and complete their goal on your platform.
If you feel they’re too important to stop completely, then at least either disable them for mobile users or set it up so a pop-up only appears when they’ve scrolled to the bottom of the page, not when they’ve just landed on it. And ensure it’s easier for them to remove the pop-up when they’re not interested in the ad.
9. Improve Speed
According to Neil Patel, 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less. Google loads millions of search engine result pages in less than one complete second. So, you can see that the era of slow website loading time is far gone as visitors are less patient with websites that load slowly.
Increasing your website loading time is no longer a laborious process. You can follow certain steps to execute the process easily. According to Hostgator, these tactics include:
Use AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) – AMP is a framework Google encourages for speeding up load times for your web pages on mobile. If you have a WordPress website, you can get started with the AMP plugin.
Compress your images and CSS – The parts of a web page that load the slowest are those that are large and take up a lot of space, such as your high-resolution images and CSS. You can speed up website load time by compressing your image file sizes, so they load faster without negatively affecting the quality of what people see on the site.
Check your web hosting plan – If your website has outgrown the web hosting plan you started with, or if you went with a less than reputable hosting provider to start, one negative consequence could be slower load times. You can speed things up by upgrading to a web hosting plan that matches your needs.
10. Run Regular Tests
That your website was mobile-friendly yesterday, doesn’t mean you will have the same experience today. You might have bugs to fix, and if you’re not carefully running a web analysis, you will keep losing visitors. So, frequently visit your website on your mobile and devote time to checking its functionalities.
You can ask your employees and friends to do the same, and consider hiring users to do user testing as well, especially when it’s a new website.
By regularly testing your website, you can get rid of slight issues that create a terrible experience for your visitors. The faster you notice them, the sooner you can update your website to provide a truly mobile-friendly experience.
Conclusion
Continually updating your website to maintain its mobile-friendliness is vital. Because the way mobile devices look and work will continually change and you need to stay ahead of these trends to remain vital. So, you must ensure you keep doing your research and implementing these strategies to improve your website view on mobile.
If you’re confused about the entire process and you’ll really prefer a quicker and efficient way to get your website to become mobile friendly, simply book a free consultation session with us today by clicking “I want a Free Consultation Session”, so we can get you a mobile-friendly website.
