Smartphones have quickly transitioned from expensive, exciting new technology to becoming a staple of everyday life. Today we find it strange that someone leaves the house without their phone. From hospital waiting rooms to theater lobbies (back when they were open anyway), it’s a normal sight to see people staring at their phones.
For website owners, this means it’s time your website offered a good mobile experience.
Reading: How to create a website for desktop and mobile
In 2016, mobile internet usage surpassed computer usage for the first time. And the trend has only intensified in the years since. Over half of all website traffic worldwide now happens on smartphones.
Although the distribution of website traffic will vary for individual websites, it is likely that around half of all your visitors will be viewing your website on the small screen of a phone. A mobile-friendly website is no longer optional. If your mobile visitors don’t have a good experience on your site, you’ll be driving away a large chunk of your traffic (and hurting your search engine rankings in the process).
You’ve heard it before, but we’ll say it again : Your website must be mobile-friendly.
Is my site already mobile-friendly?
If your site has been created or updated in the last few years, the designer or site builder you are using may have mobile phone experience in mind. Before you spend a lot of resources worrying about how to make your site mobile-friendly, check how your site is currently performing.
Google offers a mobile testing tool. Enter your URL in the search box. Not only will you get a quick answer on whether your site is mobile-friendly or not, you’ll also get a screenshot of how the page looks on a smartphone screen and a list of recommendations to improve the mobile experience.
If the tool shows that your website needs a lot of work, then optimizing your website for mobile devices should be a top priority. This will improve your website’s visibility in search engines, ensure more of your visitors stay and help you increase conversions on your website.
If the Google tool gives you the thumbs up, upgrading your site to mobile doesn’t need to be given the same priority. But you can still benefit from it if you think about how to improve the mobile experience for your users. Every bit helps.
12 steps to make your website mobile friendly
Here are some steps you can take now to ensure your website works as well for your mobile visitors as it does for your desktop user.
1. Make your website responsive.
Most web design professionals agree that creating a responsive website is the best way to create a website that works well on both desktop and mobile platforms functions. That’s because a responsive website displays the same content and information on any device you access it on, but the website is responsive to the device it’s viewed on and optimizes its appearance accordingly.
In other words, the way a page is displayed and arranged changes based on the size of the device screen. For example, an image that appears next to a block of text on a desktop can appear above it when loaded on a smartphone.
Responsive design allows you to make your website mobile-friendly without limiting the information your mobile visitors can access – they still get the same content as the rest of your visitors. And responsive design is good for SEO too. Google recommends it directly.
You may think that you cannot create a responsive website yourself. But since responsive design has become the norm, many tools now make it easy. Check out these 20 top web design tools for responsive web design.
Or choose the simplest option of all and use a website builder that offers responsive templates. All design templates in HostGator’s drag-and-drop website builder are already mobile-friendly. You don’t have to do anything special to make sure your website works on a mobile device. Just select your template and you’re good to go.
2. Make it easier to find the information you’re looking for.
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People often pull out their smartphones and look for something specific – the answer to a question, the address of a nearby restaurant, or the phone number for customer service. In these cases, they want to find the information they need as quickly and easily as possible.
Think about what information your mobile visitors are most likely looking for when they visit your website and place it in an obvious and easy-to-find place on the mobile home page. Also pay attention to the frequently asked questions that people search for most often when they visit your website. It may not make sense to put all answers front and center on your mobile home page, but make sure they’re easy to find and navigate on a mobile device.
If you’re not sure are what your mobile visitors are looking for when they come to your website, use your analytics. In Google Analytics, you can add mobile traffic as a segment in the “Behaviour” section so you can see how mobile visitors are interacting with your website.
If you run a restaurant website and mobile visitors regularly search for your menu, redesign your website to make it easier to find. If your visitors frequently visit your contact information page, consider adding it to the bottom of your homepage. By reducing the steps they have to take to find the information they’re looking for, their overall experience on your website will improve.
3. Avoid text-blocking ads and pop-ups.
No one likes them in every context, but when you’re trying to read text on a small screen, and a large ad or pop-up changes your perspective on that blocked page, it’s especially annoying.
Most of your visitors won’t take the time to find the little X to minimize the pop-up, they’ll just click away and look for another website. If you want to create a positive user experience, avoid allowing ads or popups that block a page’s content in the first place.
If you think they’re too important to drop completely, then at least disable them for mobile users or set them up to pop up only when they go to end of the scrolled page, not if you just landed on it. And make sure the X to hide the ad or popup is big enough for easy finding and selecting.
4. Make website speed a priority.
You may remember the days when you had to dial in and wait impatiently for websites to load slowly. But now that everyone takes faster internet speeds for granted, your audience won’t be waiting if your site is loading at the pace of the not-so-good ol’ days.
Google research into mobile loading speeds shows that most websites take more than five seconds to load completely, but few visitors wait that long before clicking away.
Website owners can deploy a number of tactics to improve site speed. Some of the key steps you can take to improve your mobile speeds are:
- Use AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) – AMP is a framework recommended by Google to speed up the loading times of your web pages on mobile devices. If you have a WordPress website, you can get started with the AMP plugin.
- Compress your images and CSS – The parts of a webpage that load the slowest are those that are large and take up a lot of space, such as B. Your high-resolution images and CSS. You can speed up website loading time by compressing the size of your image files so they load faster without affecting the quality of what visitors see on the website.
- Check your Web Hosting Plan – If your website has outgrown the web hosting plan you started with, or if you started with a less than reputable hosting provider have, a negative consequence could be slower loading times. You can speed things up by upgrading to a web hosting package that suits your current needs.
5. Keep your web design simple.
Complicated websites with a lot of clutter are confusing on any screen, but they make it especially difficult for visitors to navigate your site on a small screen.
Avoid Disarray. Stick to a clean, minimal design that makes it easy for users to find what they’re looking for. And with fewer files to load on each page, a simple design also contributes to faster load times.
Apply this mindset to your menu too. If your website has many pages and categories, it can make sense to offer a large menu on desktop screens. But on mobile, you want to boil it down to the essential options. Some websites are switching to placing their menu behind a hamburger button on mobile devices. That way, it doesn’t take up much space on the mobile screen, but visitors can click to open it when needed.
6. Make your buttons big enough to work on mobile devices.
It’s easy enough to click a button of any size with a mouse, but when you’re trying to “click” with your fingers on a small smartphone screen, small buttons are difficult to manipulate. And this is especially true when several small buttons are close together – pressing one button while trying to select another will really annoy your visitors.
The best way to save your visitors from this frustration is the use of larger knobs. And think about where on the screen you put them. UX expert Josh Clark writes, “While a thumb can sweep most of the screen on all but the plus-size phones, only a third of the screen is really effortless territory: at the bottom, on the side opposite the thumb.”
Every time you add a button to your website (and for everyone who’s already there), take some time to test it yourself on as many mobile devices as you have among your employees and family can find. Make sure each button is relatively easy to select on all devices, and update it if it’s not.
7. Use large font sizes.
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Reading on a small screen is much more difficult when the font is small. It’s best to use a font size of at least 14 pixels on your web pages, but just test how that looks to see if it would be better to go bigger here.
Best to stay Same with standard fonts. Any font your visitor’s browser may need to download slows down your website’s loading time, which is bad news on mobile.
8. Don’t use Flash.
Using Flash throughout your site is an SEO mistake. It can slow down page loading time and there are many browsers and devices where it doesn’t work at all. Neither Android nor iOS devices support Flash. So if you create a website that depends in any way on the Flash animation experience, your mobile users will be left out.
Most designers now know that they shouldn’t use Flash on a website, but if your website was created a few years ago, you may still have some outdated features using the outdated technology. Scrap the technology on your website completely and find a strong web design that works without it.
9. Add the viewport meta tag.
You can easily control how your website is displayed on mobile devices with the viewport meta tag. When your page is as wide on your phone’s small screen as it is on your desktop, you have to awkwardly scroll from side to side to read each line of text and see the different sides of the page. The viewport meta tag tells browsers to adjust the width of your page to fit the screen of the device type the visitor is coming from.
Adding it to your HTML is pretty easy. Just add this to the HTML for each page:
10. Disable autocorrect for forms.
We all deal with the little annoyances of autocorrect all the time, yet often site owners don’t think about how autocorrect can make a user’s interaction with your site uncomfortable.
If you have forms on your website that ask for name or address information, you can make it easier for your mobile visitors to provide this information by disabling autocorrect for each form field, otherwise their phone will try Change their name or street name to more common words and slow down your form filling.
Make sure to include autocorrect=off in the HTML code in the input field.
And if you haven’t already, make sure your forms are short. Don’t ask visitors to provide more information than necessary. No matter what device they’re on, if the form takes too long to fill out or it asks for details that a visitor doesn’t want to share, they won’t bother.
11. Provide a way to switch to desktop view.
Some of your mobile visitors may prefer to see the desktop version of your site over the mobile version (especially if you prefer a mobile version of your site as a responsive site).
Give them a way to do this if they prefer. You want your visitors to be able to interact with your website in the way that makes most sense to them.
12. Run mobile tests regularly.
The best thing you can do to ensure your website is providing a good mobile experience is to test it yourself on your mobile device regularly. Check your website on your phone and tablet from time to time and spend some time browsing to see if something is hard to see or hard to make. Ask your staff to do the same, and consider hiring users to test as well (since they see things with new eyes).
Regular testing is the best way to spot small issues, which will create a poorer experience for your visitors. The sooner you notice them, the sooner you can update your site to offer a truly mobile-friendly experience.
Make your website mobile-friendly
Even if you do everything right today, the way mobile devices look and work is constantly changing, and today’s mobile-friendly website will tomorrow might not be enough . Keep testing, keep tweaking if needed, and keep putting your mobile users first and you should be fine.
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