What is a Mobile Friendly Website?
A mobile friendly website is one that has been designed to display correctly on a mobile device, such as a smartphone or tablet.
A webpage might be considered fully functional and mobile-friendly if it loads quickly and almost all of the important information can be accessed from the home page.
Mobile devices now represent the majority of web traffic, as more people are using them as their primary internet device.
In order to ensure your site is accessible for all users, you’ll need to make sure your site is mobile-friendly.
Why a Mobile Friendly Website is Important for Your Business?
Mobile friendly websites are the need of the hour. Websites that don’t have mobile responsiveness can miss out on a lot of potential customers, and you will need to capture their attention.
Today, people spend more time on their mobile devices than they do on their laptops or desktops. Data indicates that mobile traffic accounts for 75 – 95% (in India) of website visits for a website having over 500 visits a month.
Given that 500 visitors a month is the bare minimum threshold any website would like to have, it is critical for your website to be mobile friendly.
Providing a great user experience is essential to ensure that your website reaches as many users as possible. The site should load quickly and be easy to navigate from any device – whether it’s a desktop computer, laptop, tablet or smartphone.
How to Design a Mobile Friendly Website
- Use a responsive layout. The layout should adapt to any resolution or screen size
- Make sure your images are optimized for web
- Your Main navigation should clearly visible on the layout
- The content on your pages should adhere to margins and paddings on every device
- Keep reading distance in mind when deciding how big to make text on your website
- Adapting from bigger screens (Monitors, TVs, Laptops) to smaller ones (Tablets and Mobile phones) should not break your layout. Many website become non-functional because of this
- Optimized page content and good server speed (test here) is critical for your website. Slow websites get fewer visitors and the effect is even more drastic on mobile devices
- Do not overcrowd your pages with elements such as images, icons, colors, text, etc. Spacing and breathing space is an important aesthetic quality for being mobile friendly
- Test Your Site Using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Tool
- Implement Browser caching to speed up loading for repeat visitors
- Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to speed up caching and secure your website. A good CDN (like Cloudflare or Cloud Front) can make your website globally fast and not just in the country where your server is located.
- Enable Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) for article or text content heavy pages
How to Make Your Mobile Site Appealing to Visitors
We all know how to make a website appealing to visitors. However, the same cannot be said about mobile sites. They are an entirely different beast and there are many things to take into consideration before you can make them as appealing as desktop sites.
One of the most important things in terms of the online experience is the user interface. That’s why it’s important to make sure that your site is easy to use on any device, including mobile devices. The user interface design is the core of your website’s success. So, the sooner you start, the more time you have to make changes.
A/B testing is a popular way to make sure that your site’s UI design is successful. You can target two different versions of your mobile site to two different audiences and compare their performance in terms of conversion rates or other metrics to see which one performs better.
The first thing you need to do is focus on user experience and not just aesthetics. The main reason why people won’t download your website on their mobile device is that it looks terrible and they would rather spend their time on another site that isn’t as bad looking.
The next thing you need to do is optimize for performance and design for the lower end of the spectrum in terms of devices and browsers out there in the market.
It may not look as nice but it will still be usable for your customers.
We at 7 Peaks Digital Marketing (7PDM) develop websites with the “Mobile-First” principle. In case the above steps appear too technical for you, we may be able to implement them on your behalf.
