With more of us using mobile devices to search online, and Google putting mobile friendliness at the heart of its algorithms, choosing to go mobile friendly or not is no longer optional. If you want to achieve website success, going mobile friendly is compulsory. Here’s how to make your website more mobile friendly.
Responsive design
Google encourages websites to adopt responsive design. According to PracticalEcommerce, responsive design promotes an optimal experience for mobile users, but also facilitates enhancements to site design and functionality, with increased screen size. Also, with responsive design, you only have one design to update.
Analyse your site
To make your site more mobile friendly, see how ‘friendly’ you already are. There are a number of online tools that let you assess how mobile friendly your site is. These tools can address weaknesses, so you can make tweaks and improvements to your site.
When deciding what changes to make, consider what is most important to your end users. What is it that your audiences want most when they visit your site? Use this information to shape the design and functionality.
Simplify the design
With limited space and size, you’ll need to prioritise what you include on your mobile friendly site. This doesn’t mean you have to compromise on quality or style, but it does mean you need to be a bit savvy about what design features, content or other elements you include.
To ensure you maintain a positive user-experience on mobile devices, consult with an expert design agency, such as http://www.rycomarketing.co.uk/web-design.html, who offer web design in Belfast. This may involve increasing white space around buttons for easier navigation, using drop-down or scroll menus to limit the need for entering text, and prioritising the copy you include.
Fast load times
One of the concerns that businesses face when making their sites responsive is that pages may be slower to load than on desktops. It’s vital that you address this issue, because web users don’t have the patience to stick around on pages or sites that are slow to load. In fact, anything more than a few seconds is enough to make users search elsewhere.
To improve the page load times of your site on mobile devices, limit the use of heavy, media-rich files, and prioritise the plugins you use.