How To Make Your Website Mobile Friendly
In recent blog posts, we’ve discussed the importance of your website being "mobile friendly". Ensuring your website is compatible with mobiles not only attracts more people to your website, but it reduces bounce back rates, encourages sales and can also help boost your SEO score! These days, the vast majority are using their mobile to search the web rather than the traditional desktop or laptop which has resulted in the mobile internet usage overtaking that of the PC. This means, having your website mobile friendly is now crucial if you want your business to succeed in 2018.
But how do you make your site mobile friendly?...
1. Use a responsive design
Rather than creating a separate ‘mobile friendly’ site, use a responsive web design. This will allow you to create one site, that will render correctly on both computers and mobile devices. This is a much cheaper option than creating two separate websites as all maintenance and money invested into your website is going into one single site rather than being split between two. Having a responsive design will mean all your content will automatically resize to fit the screen it is being viewed on!
2. Optimise image size
Having great quality photos on your website is obviously necessary to ensure you look professional. However, due to the bandwidth on mobiles being much smaller than on a desktop, good quality often means large file size which unfortunately causes a longer loading time. Longer loading time is likely to leave your visitors frustrated and cause them to leave your site. It’s also bad news for your SEO so, aim to have your images a small file size that still look crisp on whatever screen they are being viewed on. Shrinking your file size will keep your site loading quickly which will leave your customers happy and contribute to a much more positive image of your company.
3. Keep the design simple
Simple designs make for a much easier and convenient experience when viewing websites straight from a mobile phone. Large, complicated designs can discourage users if they can’t find what they want. Making things simple, easy to find and the website easy to navigate is crucial to please your mobile users and is much more beneficial than investing in a fancy, complex web design - trust us on this one!
4. Make sure you haven’t blocked Javascript, CSS or Image files
Google has advised against blocking these as it may result in poorer SEO rankings for your mobile and desktop site. This is especially important if you have a significant amount of mobile traffic as the mobile ranking algorithm requires them to be unblocked to get a mobile friendly ranking boost and have an all round responsive, mobile friendly site for your visitors.
5. Take the mobile friendly test
So you’ve made all the necessary changes and your website is looking great on both your desktop and your laptop, but how do you know it looks as good on all the different types and sizes of mobile? To check the mobile friendliness of your website, simply just head over to Google’s Mobile Friendly Test Page and insert your site’s URL, this will tell you what your website score is in regards to being mobile friendly, if you get a green you’re good to go!
If you have any more questions on making your website mobile friendly or about your website design in general, don’t hesitate to get in touch! We offer Website management and Creation at Sassy Digital! - @lucyhitchcock_@sassydigital