6 Things To Consider When Making Your Website Mobile Friendly
Posted February 20, 2017
By
With more than 60 percent of all Google searches coming from a mobile device, there’s definitely plenty of incentive to make your website as mobile-friendly as possible. When you throw in the fact that 4 out of 5 consumers use a smartphone to make a purchase decision on a regular basis, it’s easy to see why a website that doesn’t work well on mobile devices may not produce a lot of conversions. Fortunately, there are steps you can take to make your website more appealing to on-the-go visitors.
- Choose Between a Responsive or Completely Separate Design
Before you do anything else, you’ll need to decide if you want to create a multipurpose, or responsive, website design or have a separate mobile site. There are pros and cons with each option. A responsive site usually means less code to maintain and you won’t have to worry about having redirects to take visitors to the right site.
If you have a layout that’s difficult to make multipurpose, however, you may want to consider having one site for desktop visitors and another one for mobile traffic. Doing so will also allow you to fully tailor your mobile site exclusively for use on a mobile device without having to make design compromises to accommodate desktop visitors. Just make it easy for a visitor to get to the preferred version of your website.
- Quick Loading Time
Attention spans are even shorter on mobile devices since users are often very efficient multitaskers. And if a page is taking longer than 3-5 seconds to load, they’re likely to move on to another website. Minimize your mobile loading time by scaling your images appropriately, enabling compression and browser caching, and putting your JavaScript below most of the content, or towards the bottom before your body tag closes.
- Design for the “Fat Finger”
Most smartphone screens are about five inches and tablet screens are roughly 9-13 inches. Help your mobile visitors avoid the frustration of tapping the wrong button on smaller screens with a website designed for “fat fingers.” In other words, leave plenty of space around important buttons, such as the ones people will need to hit to start the checkout process, complete a purchase, or place an order.
- Keep Content Consistent
If you’re converting a desktop site to a mobile one, avoid the temptation to snip and clip content here and there. Instead, streamline your content in a way where the message is still the same. Google now considers “hidden” or expandable text (click a link and additional text appears) when ranking a site, as long the content is actually relevant for users. And this is one way to minimize clutter on your mobile site without cutting content that needs to remain.
- Have a Prioritized ‘Tel Link’
With mobile devices, smartphones in particular, having a link with your phone number makes it easier to encourage conversions if your main goal is to get people to call. “Tel links” are also effective on mobile devices since most people don’t automatically look for the bottom of a page when scrolling or tapping on a mobile screen to find contact info with the phone number. It’s also way to avoid possible disruptions in the conversion process or frustration over having to start over again.
- Do Not Use Hover Links
The idea of attracting attention to your links by having them change color when the cursor is moved over them makes perfect sense on a desktop PC. Mobile visitors don’t use a mouse, so such links are just annoying. Instead, use less distracting ways to attract attention to your mobile links such as bold or underlined text.
