Not having a mobile-friendly website is one of the easiest ways to scare away your online customers. Research, interacting with brands, and the purchasing of products and services are increasingly performed on smartphones and other devices — from fashion to tech and home improvement services to business consulting. Making your site easy to maneuver, attractive, and truly engaging is crucial to improving your bottom line.
How to Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly
1. Place a Central Focus on Visual Quality
With the high-resolution and HD screens on most modern devices, your images need to look amazing. Alternate photos should be available for crisp, clear viewing on 1080p and 1440p. Part of your responsive design could even include a carousel feature that brings four images into one on mobile device screens.
2. Make Sure File Sizes Are Small
These lovely, appealing images can’t be designed with large files. Utilizing the lowest file size possible will allow faster uploads — preventing the dreaded high bounce rate. If your pages take more than 2-3 seconds to load, viewers aren’t going to stick around very long (and buy something!) Experienced designers can create that “wow” factor with a file size that won’t leave your viewers hanging.
3. Be Diverse with Content Formats
Video is definitely king and queen in regard to mobile content and, in 2018, make sure to give your viewers more. Keep an eye on your most-visited (and profitable) text areas of the site and provide companion pieces and fresh formatting. Try infographics, interactive tools, or even slideshows or clickable slideshares with this text or on other pages to keep them coming back for more. Diversity is an essential way to make your website more mobile-friendly.
4. Design (or Redesign) Your Website With Tabbed Content
Whether you use WordPress or other platforms, tabbed browsing lets users open separate documents and keep them active in the same browser window. Acting like a graphical widget, users can run text and video concurrently without having to close out one or move between windows. It’s a pretty simple feature that makes a site more user-friendly. Many inbound marketing agencies offer website design services to bring sites up to date for the tastes of 2018 users.
5. Embrace Brevity
Focus on precision. Bringing a hard-to-impress editor’s eye to your site will serve your busy and often distracted mobile users well. Not to say that your customers don’t consume long-form content at all because they do. But there are ways to present this content to help keep them on your site. Using a summary either at the beginning or at the bottom of the page helps; you can also utilize SEO for certain quick answers to common questions. This will help bring up your rankings too.
6. Consider Using “Media Queries”
You don’t have to be a programmer or developer, but the person or agency that designs your site can help you with this one. A media query is a special style sheet that gives your website the ability to discern what type of device is being used to access it. A very valuable tool when it comes to responsive design. Personalized experiences with smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices not only increase the overall UX but the more responsive the design, the higher your ranking will be in Google too.
7. Make it Easy to Scan
Small phone screens certainly don’t present information the way laptops and desktop computers do. A significant point to think about when you are attempting to figure out how to make your website more user-friendly. Try out a number of techniques to help your viewers find the information they need quickly. The pages on your site can include such methods as:
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- Bullet points and subheaders
- Short paragraphs – five lines or fewer of text
- Lots of whitespace
- Easy-to-read fonts – elaborate or artistic ones are a no-no for mobile
- Dark text on a light background for contrast
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8. Top-load Your Pages
Check all of the pages on your website and look for the most important information. Designing your site with crucial information on or very near the top of the page makes mobile viewers very happy. They don’t want to have to put on their private investigator hat to find the answer they need the most. Make it easy for them and this will act as a trampoline for your conversion rates.
9. Simplify Your Forms
Complicated forms that take too much time to fill out can really reduce your leads. Don’t put up these kinds of fences for your potential customers. Think about the least amount of information you need and design the forms on your website accordingly. Having forms near the top of the page will also increase the amount of participation — don’t bury your forms!
10. Feel the Need for Speed
If all these techniques on how to make your website mobile-friendly had a debate, nine times out of ten — #10 would win. The need for speed is everything in the mobile world, with users running away from sites in record numbers if it takes more than just three seconds to load. A common culprit is older code that just can’t handle the graphics, images, and videos that consumers demand today. If your website was designed prior to HTML5, you are doing your business a big disservice.
Catering specifically to the needs of mobile users in 2018 is a vital part of a strategic business plan. Ignore them at your own peril. From maneuverability and visual excitement to diversity and speed, a mobile-friendly website is intricately tied to achieving your business goals and keeping up with your best competition.
