How to Optimize website for Mobile Devices?

The number of people using mobile devices for making online searches have drastically increased in the recent years. If you will have a look inside your Google Analytics, it will show you the number of visitors accessing your website from mobile devices. As per Statista (2022), the daily time spent on mobile apps will reach up to 227 minutes per day, which was 215 minutes in 2020. Other stats reveal that more than 60% of Google searches are from mobile devices. This has led Google to switch to mobile first indexing and prioritize mobile optimized websites when ranking pages on search re

In the current era, mobile searches are clearly dominating the internet. As most people always carry their mobile, they feel easier to find everything they want on their mobile devices. As more and more people are using their phone to search the internet, companies need to make their website mobile friendly to reach the customers. Besides, when you have a mobile friendly website, it also increases your chances to improve your search engine ranking. This gives you strong reason to have a mobile friendly site. Let’s dig deeper to understand what is mobile friendliness and why your business needs a mobile friendly website.

What Is Mobile Friendliness?

Mobile friendliness measures how well your website performs on a mobile device. In other words, it refers to how people experience your site on mobile devices such as smart phones or tablets. It is when your website is able to shrink down to fit screen of any device without distorting the user experience. The users are able to consume content, navigate the site and get everything they want from it as easily as with desktop. It also means getting rid of aggressive ads that obstructs user experience on mobile devices.

What are the best practices for optimizing a website for a mobile device?

Here are some tips to make your website mobile friendly and enrich user’s experience:

1. Start designing website with mobile first approach

The mobile first approach is the method of developing and designing website for mobile and then moving to desktop. Some designers and developers work for desktop first and then scale down website design for mobile devices. However, if you want to make your site mobile friendly, reversing the flow will be more helpful.

2. Convert or recreate existing desktop site for mobile

If you already have a website fully functioning on desktop but it is not optimized for mobile, then you must consider converting it to a mobile friendly site. There are two ways to do it: using website builders or CMS plugins

Website builders provides an intuitive drag-and-drop interface that make sit easy to develop a mobile friendly website. They also have responsive templates that easily adapt to any device used by visitors, so you don need to begin designing from scratch. CMS themes are nowadays coming with inbuilt responsiveness to adjust to all devices. If your website theme is not mobile friendly, a plugin is a way to go.

3. Use a responsive theme for your website

Make sure your website has a responsive design. It helps to optimize the appearance of your content for mobile devices. You may want to adopt an adaptive design, which loads a different version of your site as per the device.

If you want to quickly turn your website into responsive site, the quicker way to do it is to change your theme completely. However, it is not the good option for an established site. But if your site has very low traffic or you are just getting started, installing a brand-new responsive theme is the best solution.

• If you are using WordPress, you can change the theme of your site in few simple steps.
• Go to WordPress dashboard and under ‘appearance’ click on ‘themes’ and then click on ‘install themes.
• Put in ‘responsive’ and hit search.
• It will bring up all the responsive database including responsive theme. You will also get access to hundreds of other themes to choose from. Make sure to double check your new theme and ensure it looks great on all devices.

4. Simplify search menus for mobile devices

Mobile screens typically have small size than laptop or desktop screens. It is important keep this in mind when designing menu options for mobile devices. As desktop screens are bigger in size, they are able to provide space for more extensive menu with lots of options. However, things get complicated with smaller screens. If visitors have to spend much time to have to scroll or zoom in and out to see all the navigation choices, they will simply leave the site. One must ensure that everything is concise and fits on single screen.

5. Keep forms as short as possible

Consider all the different forms you have on your website. If you are asking for a lot of information from a website, people may not be responsive to your site. It is more difficult to fill forms on mobile devices than on desktop. Instead, one should change the design to keep your forms short.Keep your forms as short as possible and make sure to keep only relevant information.

6. Check if your site is mobile friendly

Your website attracts people due to its content however, the website design significantly affects your site’s bounce rate. Thus, it is important to maintain a good impression from the very beginning. To know if your site is mobile friendly, you can use Google’s mobile friendly test tool. It only requires your site’s URL to run the test.

7. Clearly display your CTAs

Your call to action buttons should be easy to understand. When you focus your attention on CTA buttons for mobile site, it will give you an edge over your competitors. Your CTA should also be easy to spot in just one or two seconds. Here are tips to use mobile CTAs and buttons to drive conversions

• Use clear and concise text
• Choose the right size and shape
• Contrast with background
• Optimize for different devices and screens
• Test and measure the performance

8. Include a well-designed search bar

When you use a well-designed search bar in a mobile interface, it also improves the usability and navigation and empowers the users to quickly gain the content they require. It should be prominently placed at the top or bottom of the screen.

• Make sure to place search bar in a prominent and consistent location

•  It should provide a clear intuitive way for users to enter and edit their queries.

• It will help to improve the output and presentation of the result

9. Make sure to provide good customer support

No matter how much you try to simplify website for mobile devices, people will still face issues. It is important to provide a good customer support to listen to people’s grievances.

Make sure to provide a great customer support information on your mobile site. You should provide your phone number, email address and social media profiles, so that people can easily contact a representative from your organisation whenever needed

10. Eliminate pop-ups

People don’t like pop ups when they are scrolling a site to get the information they need. These pops are annoying and obstruct the user experience. Keep in mind that people use their thumbs to tap on small screens and sometimes, the small “X” button to close a pop-up is so small that users won’t be able to close the window. A lot of people accidentally click on the ad while trying to close it. This ruins their experience. It is better to completely remove the pop up and look for other ways to promote whatever your pop up is advertising.  If you are deciding to keep pop up on your mobile site, then make sure to conduct a lot of testing to ensure it is not ruining the user experience,

11. Avoid using large blocks of text

If you will use large blocks of text in the sites for mobile devices, it will be difficult for people to read them and distort user experience.

When writing content for mobile device website, make sure sentences and paragraphs are short and clear. It is difficult to read large blocks of text in a website. Keep in mind, if a paragraph appears two line long on your desktop site, it might be six lines long on a smartphone.

It can be hard to read the larger block of text and also, they just fill up the screen. If you break up text into smaller chunks, it can provide easier reading experience.

12.  Choose the right font

Picking the right font is crucial for a website. Here are some tips to choose the right font to make your site mobile friendly

• It can be more or less legible to understand different terms even if they are affordable.
• 16px is a good place to start when you are choosing your default mobile font size.
• Standard fonts such as Open sans and Droid Sans are easy to read and suitable for small screen mobile devices
• Fonts can also be used to set two lines of text apart. Make sure the text of one line doesn’t run into the text of another.
• Make sure the text of one line should not run into the text of another.

13.  Prioritize speed

No matter what changes you implement on your mobile website, you should keep speed in its mind. This is important for delivering quality user experience. It also makes it good for SEO. There will be very few visitors that will be waiting for more than 5 seconds for a page to load. If people quickly leave the site, it sends poor signals to the Google.

14. Ensure to provide large size buttons

When you are browsing a website on laptop or desktop, it is much easier to move from one to another page It is easy to move cursor on laptop or desktop using a mouse in comparison to browsing with your thumbs on a 4-inch screen. When optimizing your site for mobile devices, ensure that buttons are large enough to be tapped with a finger. Make sure to triple check any buttons. Make sure button sizes are appropriate and it is often very frustrating to click on “X” to close a window that’s too small.

15. Make your site responsive using media queries

Media queries can be used to provide a fluid design that can adjust its layout based on the screen size on which it is viewed. This is achieved by using media queries in CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), which are essentially instruction telling the website how it should adapt its elements (text, images, menus, etc.) for different screen sizes.  For instance, a media query might specify that text should be of certain size on the small screen and images should appear in a single column. At the same time, it can be specified that text can be bigger and images can be displayed side-by-side on a larger screen.

16. Make appropriate use of accelerated mobile pages (AMP)

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is an initiative by Google to create lightning-fast loading web pages specifically designed for mobile devices.  AMP typically creates a stripped-down version of your content. It focuses on the core elements of the website and essentially prioritize speed in it. This ensure that website loads instantly on mobile devices providing a better user experience for the visitors on the go.

17. Widths should be defined as percentage

It is common practice to define width in percentage to make a website mobile friendly. A div element set to 50% width would take up half the width of the screen no matter on which device it has been viewed. This ensures everything scales properly and prevent elements appearing cut off or overflowing on mobile screens. It also enables visitors have to scroll horizontally as your image exceeds the screen width.

Conclusion

Mobile friendliness refers to how easy and enjoyable it is to use a website or app on a smartphone or tablet. In other words, it’s all about designing for smaller screens and touch interactions, since that’s how most people browse these days. Mobile friendliness is still considered a factor in Google’s ranking algorithm. By taking care of certain factors, you can turn your site into mobile friendly website and reap maximum benefits out of it.