Overview: A mobile-friendly website boosts your traffic. Here are some ideas to ensure that your site passes the phone test!
Smartphones quickly went from an expensive and newfangled technology to an integral part of our everyday lives. Today, we find it strange if somebody leaves their house without their phone. From hospital rooms to grocery stores and restaurants, people staring at their phones is a normal sight. For website owners, it’s high time to bid adieu to creating a website in the old-fashioned way and come up with a good mobile-friendly user experience. In the second quarter of 2022, mobile platforms accounted for 58.99% of overall web traffic. Yep — more than half! Given this significant increase in mobile internet users, designers and developers should focus on delivering seamless UX on mobile devices. It’s just the way things are now. Everyone is reaching in their pocket or purse to seek information or answer a question on their mobile device, rather than waiting until they’re back home in front of a computer!
Related Reading: Understanding the difference between UX & UI
How to Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly:
There are many factors involved in making a website mobile-friendly. When we talk about designing a mobile-friendly website, there’s a whole different set of considerations compared to a desktop-friendly site. You’re going to want everything to be easily accessible to anyone who’s viewing your website on a smartphone or a tablet. Here are some things to keep in mind as you set out to make your website mobile-friendly.
Responsive Design:
Responsive design is the bare minimum you should be aiming for, yet it’s one of the most important factors to remember. Developing a responsive design for your website is one of the key steps you can take to make your website more accessible. Even if you’re designing your website using a platform that automatically generates a mobile version using the elements from the desktop version, you’ll want to check for possible edits you can make to ensure responsive design. After all, you’re aiming for a fantastic mobile user experience, not just an acceptable one.
Choose a Mobile-Responsive Design Theme:
Having a mobile responsive theme is so important, and it’s something that pretty much every top-notch website-building platform covers across each of their templates. These are some of the best sources to get mobile-friendly themes…
Squarespace offers water-tight mobile responsiveness and is a great choice, as it not only makes the user experience a priority, but also provides good responsiveness. So if you’re building a website from scratch and mobile experience is one of your main concerns, consider using Square Space.
Wix: All templates of Wix.com are mobile-responsive; however, when you’re building your website, we advise you to check in on the mobile view as you go along. Wix offers a wide range of customizable themes, so big changes don’t translate seamlessly, and you might need to redo some things or tweaking. Or if you’re a passionate WordPress user like us and building a site using a CMS system, make sure that the theme you’re using to build your website is mobile-responsive — or if you’ve already built a website with a theme that doesn’t play well with mobile devices, switch to the one that does! Choosing a mobile-responsive theme in WordPress is simple — just search for a responsive theme in the WordPress theme library. If your version of WordPress doesn’t support that, consider going for a third party site like Themeforest. Make sure that you read reviews and take a look at the sites that are using this theme from your smartphone to gauge the experience for yourself.
Double-Check Your Content:
You’ve designed a website with a mobile-responsive, attractive theme, so you’re all done, right? Wrong! Switching to the right template is a big step, but is only one of the few steps you’ll be taking to perfect the user’s mobile experience.
Avoid large blocks of text: The copy on your website (including blog posts) should be organized into paragraphs and sections that are short and sweet. Since your website design can affect human emotions, you want to make visitors feel welcome while they’re checking out your website. Read some tips for writing for the web and take your virtual scissors to the long chunks of text.
Shorten your forms: If your website is designed to help acquire customers by inspiring them to contact you, the last thing you want is users clicking away from your website before they’ve reached out. This is exactly why you should avoid long forms or excessive security questions. Filling in long forms is already a chore, but on a mobile device? On the move? Forget it! Long forms will lose your reader even faster when every field says ‘This is a required field.’ Make sure that every form you’re displaying is only asking for information that’s absolutely necessary and is easy to load on a mobile device.
Keep Visuals As Light As Possible:
Making your website as light as possible is a good idea, but how exactly does it work? Whether it’s a picture or a video, everything on your website carries a virtual weight. Each file size has a code that needs to be loaded each time the website gets clicked on.
Google has been clear about the fact that website speed is a crucial ranking factor, meaning a slow or heavy website will lose the competition when it comes to SERPs — search engine result pages.
Have you ever visited a website where waiting for the desired information tried your patience, or the pictures took forever to load? If you’ve ever tried to load a webpage from a mobile device and it was s-l-o-w, you know the irritation it causes you as a viewer.
Compress your images: When you’re uploading an image to your site, it’s vital that your images aren’t too big. You might want to try compressing your images using a free online tool like kraken.io. Not only does it greatly reduce the file size of your image, but it does so without compromising the image quality.
Host your videos with a third party: Uploading your videos to a third-party host and then embedding them on your site can help keep your website lightweight. It simply puts the virtual weight of those videos on the host websites rather than yours!
Wistia is a popular platform for this, but you’ve to make sure that you’re switching off auto-play, so an unrelated doesn’t shuffle after yours.
Avoid elaborate animations: Animations might seem fun, but visitors will likely scroll right past them. Even worse, they might not be supported by mobile devices. It’s best to avoid them altogether!
How to Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly Summary:
Choose mobile responsive themes
Double-check your content
Make visuals as light as possible
Avoid animations
Additional pro tips:
Space out your links
Use easy-to-read fonts
Eliminate pop-ups and annoying ads
Check your website regularly by viewing it on a smartphone
In Summary:
The good news for most website owners is that the bulk of the hard work will be on you like theme or templates. That said, we believe in making a few extra tweaks to be in the line with your competitors, so when a user is reaching out to your website for some help through their smartphones, they’re getting their desired information. If your sales are drowning and you aren’t a tech pro, we’re here to help. Our creative website developers love creating for you and help you scale off your business.