5 Tips On What Makes A Website Mobile-Friendly?
Don’t just focus on responsive design and ignore other elements of your website. You can do a lot to improve your users’ mobile experiences beyond having responsive pages.
1. Make sure your website is tap-friendly
When people use their phones or tablets, they likely don’t have a mouse to help them navigate through your website’s pages. Having “clickable” elements that are too close together or that don’t work when tapped can create a poor user experience and chase people away from your business.
2. Speed things up
People aren’t patient. If your website takes longer than a few seconds to load, you’re going to lose potential customers. If you plug your pages into Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool, you can see how fast they load and what you need to do to make them faster.
Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool
You may want to consider using accelerated mobile pages (AMP), which can help your site load super quickly on mobile devices. Make sure all images and graphics you use are compressed. You’d be surprised how much of a difference a compressed file can make. If you use videos, make sure you’re not hosting them directly on your site. That can be a major reason your pages are slow.
Instead of self-hosting your videos, embed them through a third-party hosting provider like YouTube. An added benefit is that you’ll have access to plenty of data to tell you how your videos are performing.
3. Ask fewer questions
On your forms, that is.
In general, it’s better to keep your website forms short. Cut out any unnecessary fields so people can quickly give you the information that matters. But think about the mobile experience. Typing on a phone isn’t always fun. The keyboard is small. The letters are too close together.
The less you have to type on a phone, the better.
Stick with the most important information you need to communicate with your customers and cut everything else.
4. Watch out for popups
On a computer, you have plenty of space for a popup to enter the screen and not completely disrupt people’s reading.
On a mobile device, a popup may take over someone’s screen. How would you feel if you were reading an article on your phone, and all of a sudden there’s a big pink box obscuring the text? The words “frustrated” and “annoyed” come to mind for me. Even worse, if someone can’t figure out how to close the popup, they may abandon a site altogether.
You may want to avoid popups—or use them sparingly—on mobile devices to avoid creating a bad user experience.
5. Slice through large paragraphs
Break up with long blocks of text, because I’m bored.
While a four-sentence paragraph might look small on a larger monitor, it will take up much more space on a phone. You don’t have to write less. Just break large paragraphs into smaller ones. Shorter paragraphs can help make your content easier to read. You can also break your content into smaller sections. So start with a main heading and add subheadings throughout that correspond with different subtopics. Adding multimedia elements can help break things up, but keep in mind that videos and photos can slow your pages down if not optimized properly. If you update your content according to these five tips, you’re bound to make your website mobile-friendly.
If you need help with responsive web design or with making different elements of your site ready for mobile users, don’t hesitate to reach out to our web design professionals.
