In today’s world, everything has or is moving into the mobile sphere. This transition is because people use mobile devices in many aspects of their daily life, from browsing the web, online banking, attending online classes, shopping, planning trips, and so much more.
As the number of people using mobile to access the internet continues to grow, there’s an increased need to optimize your website for these mobile users so as to give them a positive user experience.
Here are 8 strategies you can implement to optimize your website for mobile use:
1. Start with a Responsive Website Design
Having a responsive site design is one way to ensure that mobile users visiting your site have an enhanced user experience with their mobile devices.
When your website has a responsive design, it automatically adjusts its size and page content to fit perfectly on any screen it’s being viewed on.
This ensures that your site remains attractive and easy to navigate and use for all visitors, including mobile users.
Responsive web design has the added benefit of helping to reduce mobile visitor bounce rates and ultimately increasing your conversion rates.
2. Keep Paragraphs Short & Concise
Mobile devices have small, narrow screens that make it extremely difficult for users to read long blocks of text comfortably. Similar to long lines, that can cause fatigue for desktop users.
So, keeping your paragraphs and sentences short is essential to improve your content readability on mobile devices. Also, consider adding numbers and graphics to your content to help you convey your message with fewer words.
3. Optimize Your Page Speeds
Apart from your mobile users expecting your website to load in three seconds or less, search engines like Google have strict page speed requirements for your website. Page speed is a significant performance indicator required to maintain your website’s ranks among search engine results pages.
It will wear on their patience when your site takes a long time to load and exceeds user expectations. Few people will be willing to waste precious time when other competing sites offer information, products, and services similar to yours.
Therefore, you need to optimize your site’s load speed to attract and retain mobile visitors in the long term.
Here are four mobile optimization tips to get started with:
- Compress Your Images – Since large images can significantly impact loading times for mobile devices, you need to compress them to improve your pages’ load speed. Use any image optimization tool of your choice to do so easily and quickly.
- Enable Gzip Compression – Gzip compression ensures that any requested website pages are compressed before they’re sent to users. This helps to reduce your file size and improve your overall load speed.
- Consider Using AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) – AMP pages load almost instantly on all platforms and devices, which gives mobile users a great browsing experience.
- Simplify Your Website Design – You must also simplify your design by removing any flashy features or unnecessary images that may slow down your loading speed.
4. Design Your Website for Touch Navigation
Another thing that’s important when optimizing your site for mobile is navigation.
Navigating websites using fingers is usually very frustrating for mobile users, especially when the clickable elements are too close together or too small in size.
This frustration is reason enough why you should design your site in a way that makes touch navigation easy for mobile users.
One way to do so is by creating an appropriate distance between your clickable elements to make them easier to click on mobile.
Also, ensure that the size, also known as click space, of your elements, buttons, and text is large enough to give mobile users a better browsing experience.
5. Optimize Images & Videos
Images and videos are excellent marketing tools. However, they can also slow down your website speed if they’re too large. They’re often one of the biggest culprits, along with advertisements, for page speed issues.
Many popular tools and services, such as TinyPng and Cloudinary, can help optimize your images and video file sizes.
But first, check your web hosting provider to see if they offer these services before spending additional resources or time, as it’s often a bundled feature.
6. Simplify Your Forms
Due to the smaller screen size, forms are harder to fill out on mobile devices than on desktops and laptops. This reality usually frustrates mobile users, forcing them to bounce from websites immediately.
To solve this issue, you should reduce the number of forms you’re asking your visitors to fill out and only ask them for the information you absolutely need.
Other things that can make the form-filling process simpler for mobile users are checkboxes and dropdowns, so consider adding them to your site as well.
7. Eliminate Intrusive Pop-ups
Pop-ups are one of the most annoying things people have to deal with when browsing the internet. More so when pop-ups designed for desktops are utilized for mobile devices.
When you least expect it, they’ll appear on your screen and block your view, preventing you from doing whatever you were doing earlier.
The worst part is that some of them can be so difficult to close, which leaves you with no option but to leave the website altogether.
If you don’t want your mobile visitors to go through this bad experience, you must avoid using pop-ups unnecessarily.
It’s much better to use call-to-action buttons to direct them to a landing page to take your desired action instead of using pop-ups.
But, if you must use pop-ups, ensure that they:
- Do not cover the entire screen
- Are easily dismissible for your mobile users
- Don’t weigh the user experience down
- Avoid distracting the user from their main intent
8. Make Your Contact Information Clearly Visible
Having your contact information clearly visible on your website is an integral part of mobile optimization. Small business owners often overlook this simple piece.
Displaying your social media buttons and contact details prominently makes it easier for your mobile visitors to reach out to you in case they need help or want to conduct business!
Don’t forget to include your business and support hours if you operate a brick-and-mortar.
Final Thoughts on Optimizing Your Website for Mobile Users
While it’s true, industry-wide conversion rates are lower on mobile devices when compared to laptops and desktops because mobile users face many challenges while browsing online. But there’s still great value and opportunity to be gained from optimizing your website for mobile users.
Mobile optimization is a great way to reduce these challenges and give your mobile visitors a wonderful browsing experience. Hopefully, you’ll implement the above tips to give your mobile visitors the best experience and improve your mobile conversions.