Easy Access: Fast and Simple Strategies to Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly

Not long ago, the majority of people visiting your business’s website would have been using a desktop computer. These days, there’s a good chance that the majority of them are using a mobile device.

The change in browsing habits means that your website must be mobile-friendly if you want it to be successful. Here are some simple tips you can put into place to make your site mobile friendly.

Why Is Mobile Friendliness Important?

Firstly, let’s look at why your site needs to be mobile optimized. There are two main reasons:

• The first is that it will improve the user experience for site visitors, which will encourage more people to spend time on your website. If you own an online store, it will lead to more sales.

• The second is increased visibility. If your site is not mobile friendly, this will hurt its rankings in the search engines when people make a search on a mobile device.

It’s for that reason that SEO companies like Poet.co/poet-media/ will always recommend making your site mobile friendly as one of the first steps you take to improve your SEO.

So how should you do this?

Get a Responsive Design

The best option for most websites these days is to use a responsive design. This means designing a website that can display correctly on any device, whether a computer or a mobile phone, and the design actually changes depending on the screen size.

The alternative is to create a separate mobile version of your site, but this is not usually recommended these days. It’s usually much better to just have one website for all devices, so find a designer who specializes in responsive design, and give your site a redesign.

Make Changes to Your Website

Once you have got a responsive design, your website will officially be mobile friendly. However, it doesn’t stop there. Now you want to make sure you optimize the experience for mobile visitors, and there are a number of ways you can do this.

Firstly, make sure the copy is suitable for mobile viewing. This usually means not including too much content on the page because long pages of content may clutter up your site for mobile visitors. Instead, try to keep the pages simple.

Also make sure the font is not too small. Nothing is worse than landing on a website and being unable to read anything without zooming in, so keep it to at least 14px.

This will mean visitors do not have to zoom in to read anything, and it will be more legible—providing a more positive user experience.

Also make sure your buttons are big enough. If they are too small this will make them difficult to press using a thumb or finger, and users might have difficulties, which can be frustrating.

Remember, you want it to be as simple and pleasant to use as possible. If you don’t know how big your buttons should be, test them out, play around with your website, and see if you encounter any difficulties.

Ensure the images are optimized for mobile. High-resolution images are important because these will look better on the modern high-definition screens. But make sure they don’t take too long to load so that the site loads quickly, which is important for the user experience.

Remember that many people will be using a mobile connection to view your website, and this often means 3G speeds.

In the same way, other elements should be kept simple, like the graphics. Using fewer graphics and a clean design can help to make the page load quicker.

Be careful with videos. People love videos, especially on mobile devices, but make sure that they can view videos with ease. The best option is to simply use YouTube. Upload your video to YouTube, then embed the code in your site. This embed code is responsive, so you won’t have to worry about how the video will look.

Also make sure you provide a full website version. Sometimes people will want to see the full version, so let this be an option for them. You want to provide visitors with exactly what they want, even if that is to see the full version of the website.

Optimize Your Mobile Website Experience

These are some of the most important steps for providing a positive experience for mobile visitors to your website. If you have not done so already, make sure your website is mobile optimized by creating a responsive version.

Then focus on the above areas to ensure it is optimized for mobile visitors to improve their experience of your website and your company.

Robert Atkins has worked as a website consultant for close on a decade. He enjoys the challenge of keeping up to date with Google as well as how technology is changing the way we shop, interact and indeed live our lives.