We spend more time than ever browsing the web on our mobile phones. In 2019, the average American adult spent an estimated two hours and 55 minutes on their mobile phone every day, a nine-minute increase from 2018. Since 2013, the percentage of web traffic coming from mobile devices has shot up from 31% to more than 52% effectively. So, a mobile optimized website is the key to success in the decade of 2020.
If you have a website, more than half of your visitors, on average, will be browsing with a mobile device.
This means that if your website is not optimized for mobile, you could be turning off a significant chunk of your brand’s prospective customers.
You have to optimize your website for mobile if you want to capture the most conversions possible.
Future focused IT firms provide user-friendly website development solutions that deliver perfect mobile-first experience to the consumers.
Now, we will thoroughly discuss techniques for testing mobile friendliness of your website.
We will also briefly consider ways of optimizing your website for mobile phones and tablets.
Why Mobile Optimization is Important for Website
Because more users search on cellphones than desktops, Google prioritizes mobile-optimized sites in its search results.
If your website is not optimized, Google and other search engines will push it down the search results page.
This means that your efforts at securing organic traffic may go to waste.
There are also serious costs beyond your placement in the search results.
Bing, Yahoo and other search engines also give preference to a mobile optimized website over non mobile-friendly websites in the search results.
Nowadays, organic visitors to a website are very impatient.
They have internet access; can receive any kind of content they want on-demand and will not wait long to get it.
More than half of all web users expect pages to load in under two seconds.
By the three-second mark, most mobile users have already navigated away.
A website that may load fast enough on a desktop with Wi-Fi may take much longer on a phone connecting over a cell network.
Low website usability can also push users away and lower the opinion of your brand.
Mobile-friendliness is increasingly viewed as a standard for websites these days over the world.
In essence, employees are starting to expect mobile access to work systems from their employers.
If the mobile version of your site is unpleasant to navigate, then visitors will leave it.
They will have a lower opinion of your brand and will be less likely to convert ever.
A slick and polished mobile experience, on the other hand, can help you build your brand’s credibility.
A well-designed mobile experience will also lend you a strategic advantage over competitors who do not have a mobile optimized website.
Therefore, web programming procedure now emphasizes measures to make sure that developed website is mobile responsive.
Checking the Mobile-Friendliness of your Website
With the right techniques, you can cut back on load times and improve your website’s mobile aesthetics.
Mobile-ready testing tools, like Google’s mobile site speed checker, allows you to test the optimization of your website by URL or by pasting in your website’s code.
It will generate a screenshot of how your site will appear to most mobile devices, as well as a list of any common mobile usability problems your website may have.
These issues include overly small font sizes, not optimized images or the use of Flash, which is no longer supported by Adobe and will not run on most mobile devices.
You will also want to check how fast your site loads.
Most analytics platforms, Google Analytics included, offer tools that let you check how quickly your website opens on average.
These tools will also typically break out what exactly is contributing to your load time.
Website slowness may not be due to the website’s design.
Communication with your web hosting partner’s server may be the culprit.
This is a problem that can be fixed by switching hosts or upgrading your web servers.
Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool will also help in reporting many issues of such kind.
Optimizing your Website for Mobile
Once you have identified the major problems, you can begin working on optimizing your website for mobile.
There are three major perspectives for mobile optimized website design.
- Responsive Design: Design your website with content and structure that changes based on what kind of device a visitor is using.
- Dynamic Serving: Create a parallel, mobile-specific version of your website and serve these web-pages to visitors using mobile phones.
- Parallel URLs: It is just like dynamic serving, but you create a parallel set of URLs and steer mobile users to these web-pages.
From the three options, “Responsive Design” is the easiest to implement and is the cheapest to maintain.
It is the most preferred mobile optimization strategy for most website designers and web developers.
With the approach of responsive design, you want all the different elements of your site’s design.
Whether they are sidebars, contact info forms or blog posts — they need to scale or respond based on user input.
Your mobile website will be as content-complete as your desktop version, but with content that is mobile-ready.
Dynamically compress large images and scale up text so that it is easy to read on the mobile devices.
Good mobile website design is about ensuring your website is just as attention-grabbing and easy to navigate on cellphones as it is on desktops.
Keep the navigation bars and menus short to achieve this goal.
Optimize the forms for mobile keyboards, which can be harder to use than the desktop versions.
For example, you can allow date entry with a calendar popup, rather than through manual entry.
Make it easy to navigate to the important pages, especially the homepage, no matter where a user is on your website.
Some best practices for mobile design will just require basic knowledge of website programming.
You will want to minimize your website’s HTML, CSS and HTML. Avoid render-blocking your CSS and JavaScript in above-the-fold content — instead, make inline calls to functions as needed.
Divide your cascading style sheets, so your website is not trying to load your CSS and JavaScript before opening page content.
Google’s mobile-friendliness tool will tell you if you are doing this.
Testing your new Mobile Optimized Web Design
Once you have settled on a draft design for your website’s mobile version, you should test its usability.
Many tools will also provide you with feedback from the site testers.
Resulting information as well includes other useful UX info, like videos of user sessions, depending on which device you use.
These videos can give you an idea of how people navigate your website and any elements that may be a little awkward.
Getting your website mobile-ready may take a few iterations.
But the benefits will almost certainly make up for the costs.
The visitors and brand credibility you can gain from a polished mobile experience will help you market your products and drive conversions.
Next Steps
Current estimates show that mobile usage is likely to grow even further through 2021.
It means that effective web design will probably only become more important over time.
This growth also means the strategic advantage of mobile websites will become even more valuable.
Are you on the lookout for a mobile optimized website?
So, you are crafting a new website, or want to re-design your existing website to better serve users.
Facilitating customers with mobile-first experience has become necessary in 2020 and the future decades.
It is never too late to start the journey for mobile responsive website.
Techliance is here to help you in all of your website creation and modification needs.
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