Making sure a site is mobile-friendly ensures you provide a consistent experience for all your users. You may even want to design for mobile first and then check the results on your desktop for any needed tweaks.
According to Statista, there are approximately 4.66 billion active internet users, and 59.5% of them access the internet via their mobile devices at least sometimes. If your site doesn’t adapt to smaller screens, you risk a big portion of your visitors bouncing away to a site more suited to their needs.
Why Is Mobile Optimization Important?
A mobile-optimized site increases the odds of engaging site visitors. Once a user takes action, they’re much more likely to stick around long enough to learn about your product or service and convert it into a lead.
Customers spend untold hours perusing sites on mobile. They tend to skim over the material. If your site isn’t conducive to mobile scrolling and one-tap actions, they’ll move on to the next topic. Here are some tricks for marketers to ensure a website works for mobile and entices users to become customers.
Enable SMS Messaging
Around 96% of Americans own a cellphone, making texts a popular form of communication. You can offer a perk for clients by providing customer service via texts. Some programs allow you to insert answers to frequently asked questions via bot. You can then shift to a live agent if the customer needs additional help or asks a question outside the norm.
SMS messaging is a great way to stay in touch with your leads, too. Send out a note about a special offer, big news about your practice, or update them on changes in rules.
Simplify Navigation
Your beautiful navigation bar that looks so lovely on a desktop may fall off the screen on a mobile phone. Start by cutting down the categories on your navbar. You can always use additional subcategories or sub-subcategories, but limit the main choices to under five.
While some people claim to hate a hamburger menu, it works well on smaller screens because it doesn’t take up precious real estate. You can put the focus on your hero image or a headline and reduce the menu to a small icon in the upper corner. Nearly everyone knows what a hamburger icon means.
Watch Site Speed
One of the top browsers online is Google, and they went 100% mobile-first indexing in 2021. If your site is desktop only, it won’t even be indexed and you may miss out on potential traffic. Page speed directly impacts their algorithms and could knock your site further down the list of options in search engine results pages.
Invest in the best server you can afford. Lose any scripts or plugins slowing your site down. Test your page speed and get feedback on how to optimize images and elements for the fastest possible load times.
Lose the Flash
If you’re still using Flash on your website, kick it to the curb. While you can do a lot with it, if someone doesn’t have it downloaded to their desktop or they are on certain mobile devices, it won’t work.
You might have a cute animation but it looks blank to someone accessing your site on their mobile devices. Flash can also slow down your site and hurt your traffic patterns.
Write for Scannability
People on mobile devices tend to scan down the screen, only stopping to read the content about their questions. When you write an article or copy for your website, keep in mind the reading patterns of smartphone users.
Use subheadings, bullet points, and short paragraphs. Ideally, each page will have plenty of white space and the sizing adapts to whatever device the user selects.
Make Buttons Bigger
Although there are different suggestions for just how large a call to action (CTA) button should be for best mobile compatibility, make them bigger than you normally would. Keep in mind that your users won’t be clicking with the precision of a mouse.
Different users also have different hand sizes. It might be harder for someone with larger hands to navigate the buttons, especially if the clickable area is particularly small and other actionable elements surround the button.
Add in plenty of white space and make the button and the selection area larger for the most precise results.
Test Run
Once a design is mobile optimized, go ahead and take it for a test run. Pull your site upon a variety of mobile devices on Android and iOS. Try everything by clicking, filling in forms, and viewing images and text.
You may find your site needs many tweaks to appear the way you want on a mobile phone. If you start with a template or theme that is already mobile responsive, you’ll save steps. Keep your design simple and functional and you should have fewer issues getting it optimized for all devices.
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