If you’ve got a website, you’re already on the road to being more successful with your business. But if your website isn’t optimized for mobile devices, you may be losing out on a whole lot of potential business.
Mobile optimization is essential, because more than half of web page visits come from mobile devices. So if your website doesn’t look great on mobile and is hard to navigate on the phone, you’re going to be chasing potential customers away.
Here are some steps to ensuring your website is mobile-friendly and responsible. Put these things into place and you can expect better results overall in terms of traffic, conversion rates, and repeat business.
1. Use a Responsive Template/Theme
Responsive web design is where it begins. Your website should be built using a responsive theme or template in your website builder. If someone else has built/is building your website for you, make sure they’re aware of this. If you’re creating it on your own, choose your template carefully.
Already built your website on a non-responsive theme? In some cases, you can switch your theme to a responsive one. This means you might need to spend some time redesigning your site, but it’ll be worth it.
If you can’t switch your theme, you can use this handy trick. Insert this line of code into the <head> tag of every page of your website and each page should automatically adjust to mobile.
<meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0″>
2. Remove/Optimize Your Pop-Ups
Pop-ups work great for websites on desktop computers. But on mobile devices, they can clutter up the screen quickly and cause frustration as they’re difficult to close on small screens, potentially leading to enough annoyance for the visitor to leave your site and not come back.
Get rid of any unnecessary pop-ups. If you must keep one, set it to only appear once the reader has scrolled to around 75% of the page. Otherwise, try to repurpose your pop-ups into CTAs on each page instead.
3. Declutter Your Website
Streamline your website as much as you can so there’s nothing cluttering up the screen for mobile users. A clean, spacious design is the first port of call here—stick to two or three colors, clean lines, and well-spaced and formatted text.
Here are some ways to declutter your site:
- Remove repeated information.
- Get rid of unnecessary images/videos.
- Use white space, not a dark background.
- Opt for a hamburger menu to save space.
- Stick to one straightforward CTA per page.
4. Optimize Your Web Page Loading Speed
More than half of all website visitors are on mobile, and more than half of those visitors will leave your website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Optimize your website speed if you want your site to be mobile-optimized!
Compress your images, use a CDN, enable browser caching, remove plugins your website isn’t using, and embed videos from an external source (YouTube, Vimeo, etc).
If you’ve done all of those things and your website is still slow, you may want to consider switching to a new web host. Choose one that’s known to be fast, and if you have a WordPress website, you might want to opt for a web host that’s optimized for WP.
5. Compress Your Images
If you do need images on your website, make sure they’re compressed so they take up as little space as possible in your website’s memory. You can easily compress images for free online, so this is an easy step that could make a big difference to how fast your site loads on mobile browsers.
Double-check that every image on your website is actually relevant and necessary. Avoid placing too many pictures, especially on blog posts. One picture for every 500 to 100 words is adequate.
6. Use HTML5 Rather Than Adobe Flash
Adobe Flash is a popular software for animations. The bad news is that while it creates amazing animations, it’s also not supported in most mobile devices, so your beautiful design might not even be able to be seen on mobile devices.
As great as Flash is, it’s best to avoid using it if the animations are going to be used on a website. Opt for HTML5 instead, which works well on mobile devices for animations, as well as for embedding music and movies.
7. Perform Real-World Testing
You can do all of these things and your website should become more mobile-friendly. But you’ll never know unless you do real-world testing on your own mobile phone, or others you know.
It’s a great idea to get a group of friends and family involved to test your website for you. Get them to check out your website on their mobile device and make a note of which devices are used.
Ask them to make notes of anything they come across that’s annoying, difficult to navigate, frustrating, or that they think could be done better. Sometimes, they come up with things you didn’t think of—as the owner/creator of the website, sometimes you need external eyes on it to see the things you don’t!
Conclusion
Ensuring your website is mobile-friendly and responsive isn’t as hard as you might think. Implement these few steps and you should find that it makes a good bit of difference towards making your site easier to use on a mobile device.
Remember, if your target audience includes youngsters, the chances are much higher of them browsing on mobile devices. You can’t afford to neglect this aspect of your website—if you want to stay relevant and be easily found by your target visitors, then a mobile-friendly, responsive website is a necessity, not a luxury.
About the Author
Paul Wheeler runs a web design agency that helps small businesses optimize their websites for business success. He aims to educate business owners on all things website-related, at his own website, Reviews for Website Hosting.