Mobile Friendly Website –
Mobile internet users have doubled in the past two years and this has resulted from the Google algorithms to include mobile-friendly websites as one of the factors in ranking the websites. When you are creating your site for desktop, always remember that there are also a lot of visitors who visit your site from the mobile device. Mobile internet users have crossed the desktop users so having a mobile-friendly website is a necessity.
What is a Mobile Friendly Website?
Just because your site can be viewed on the mobile it does not mean that your site is the mobile friendly website.
A mobile-friendly website is a one which is developed and optimized so that every user irrespective of the type of mobile devices they use, gets a good user experience from the site. The mobile-friendly website is determined by a few important characteristics which are listed below
- Easy navigation to the pages of the mobile friendly website
- Elements of the site are designed to simplify the usage of the site
- Contents modified according to the mobile consumption
- Click to call functionality being added to the site
- Addresses are provided to help the users use the mobile device’s map
- Simple forms or email functionality added to the site for calls to action
To make sure that your mobile customers have a good experience from your site follow the below mentioned suggestions or tactics.
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Create a mobile version of your current site
The easiest method to make your site mobile friendly website is to create a mobile version of our site. Mobile visitors will be more interested in the mobile-friendly version of your site with themes and colors as it is in the main site. This will help the visitors confirm that they are on the right site. But while updating the sites make sure that the content of the desktop site and the content of the mobile site are the same. The visitors will get confused if there is two different information available. And you can also pick out the important elements of the desktop site to be added to the mobile site.
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Create a responsive site
Use a responsive technology framework to create a site. These frameworks will help the mobile site to be viewed easily on different screen sizes. Some frameworks are open source, documented and are easy to use. This reduces the effort of the website developers while creating a site. The responsive site gives the users a similar experience whether they are viewing on a tablet or a smartphone. The responsive site also gives a lot of benefits as it consolidates your website so you don’t need to have a separate mobile URL, it is easy to manage and offers a lot of SEO benefits.
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Use mobile plugins on a popular CMS platform
There are a few popular mobile-friendly web pages CMS like WordPress, Joomla or Drupal. They offer the best solutions to make your site mobile friendly website without the need to create two versions of the site separately for desktop and for mobile. They also have additional methods to customize the mobile site and include the best features to be used on mobile devices to make the user get the best experience from the site.
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Think with your thumb
Make sure that your site has easy navigation between the pages of your site with one thumb. The mobile users should be able to navigate with their phone hand without wanting to use the second hand. And avoid the contents from being zoomed by the viewers. If the users are in need to zoom the contents then it means that the contents are not perfectly optimized for the mobile device.
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Font and buttons size matters
Another important factor to consider is that the buttons and menus are big enough for a touchscreen mobile device. Mostly the mobile sites will resize the screens using CSS media queries. Mobile sites should allow easy selection and removal of buttons. At least 45 pixels of space should be given for buttons or tap elements as per the rule of thumb. Bigger the button, the better it will be.
The font size should be at least 14 pixels. It should be easily readable by the users without wanting to zoom in.
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Simple design
A neat and simple mobile-friendly web pages can go a long way. You have got only a few seconds to convey the message about your company to the visitors. So the website design plays an important role here. Particularly you should be very cautious in designing the site for mobile devices.
Too many animations or graphics on the site will make the site slower and it will also distract the visitors. If you are using images on your site use it in smaller byte size.
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Make your content short and sweet
Content is the most important thing that attracts a visitor to a site. Make your content tell the whole story in a few words. Mobile devices screen are much smaller when compared to the desktop. So include only the important contents of a mobile site. Mobile users also scroll down quickly so include contents that are very attractive to them.
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Include a viewport meta tag
The viewport meta tag is used by internet browsers to find out how far the content fits the mobile site. It is an important factor to consider when creating a multi-device site. The viewport meta tag will tell the browser whether the page fits the screen or not. You can also configure your viewport to control a lot of other things.
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Optimize the images
High-resolution images are more important for a responsive site to make the user get a better experience. Many mobile devices even with a 3G network are still lagging in the downloading speed. Taking all these factors into consideration it is very important to resize, crop and optimize the images that fit well with the mobile devices. The latest models of mobiles require images which are double the resolution of a desktop. Having such high-quality images will reduce the blurred images on your mobile device. Optimizing the mobile images will increase the site speed and enhances the user experience.
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Avoid excessive JavaScript
JavaScript acts differently on different browsers and devices. Even for the different models of the same mobile, JavaScript acts differently. So try to replace bulky JavaScript libraries with standalone JavaScript. Always have in mind that overloading the JavaScript will affect the performance of your site.
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Provide your business information
Mobile users often look out for the contact information. So provide your phone number, location, and contact information. You can also use a map to locate your nearest store. If a call to action or an email form is provided to the users it will serve as an added advantage.
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Don’t limit your user experience
Even if you have designed and developed a beautiful mobile site with perfect features, you should always provide an option “go to the full website” or “view desktop version” at the bottom of your mobile site. This is because some users might be interested to explore more about your business. So if you constraining them then it means that you are losing a potential customer of your business.
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Use videos on your site
Videos also play an important role to play in the mobile site. This is because a recent study shows that visitors on mobile devices are more likely to watch videos than desktop or computer users.
Adding video is not an important thing but adding a video technology which provides a perfect experience to the users is an important thing. If you include a lot of videos on your site then it will slow down your site and creates a lot of problems.
Also, use a video player that does not consume a lot of bandwidth so that you can improve your page speed. YouTube is the best option to add videos to your site. This is because YouTube uses embedded code that is responsive. So using YouTube for your mobile site can make the site user-friendly and can offer a better user experience.
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Design the forms for mobile
Make your form short and simple. See through that the form requires only the minimum amount of information from the users. The number and size of the form fields should be kept at a minimum level. But improve the technology to get the maximum usability of the form. For example, If you are able to track the user’s location then don’t ask them to enter their city, state, and pin code.
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Set form input attributes
If you have a form that asks for the users to enter their name then turn off the auto correct and turn on the auto-capitalize option. If you don’t make such changes to the form attributes then the phone will change the name of the user to something else if it is not found in the dictionary. If you are asking the user to give their email id then use the email input field in your form attribute so that the @ symbol automatically appears in the keyboard. This will help the user to enter the details with ease and it will also make them more engaged with the site.
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Avoid fixed position
If your website has a header or sidebar with a CSS property which is set to the fixed position, then know that when a user zooms in then that particular header or sidebar also zooms in. This collapses the look of the site. So make sure that you disable the fixed position when you are creating a mobile site.
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Use extra spaces with caution
When you wanted to display a long string of numbers to the users, then split them into 5 letter groups with a space in between them. For example, 45678 54321 8786e. This will help the users to easily do the copy paste work or type them into another application. On a desktop, this method will work out best because deleting the spaces is easy on the desktop when compared to mobile devices.
In order to delete the spaces automatically while copying and pasting in the mobile device just wrap the five letter groups in an element by adding some padding in between. Now if the user copies the letters with spaces and when he pastes it in another document the spaces will not appear. This saves time and effort.
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Be careful when disabling submit buttons
Some website might disable the submit buttons in the forms once the form is submitted. This is done in order to avoid multiple submissions. When you are enabling this option for your mobile site you will have a lot of problems. Because the mobile networks are too poor and are frequently disrupted and the user might also get a cal while submitting the form. In such cases, mobile users will not be allowed to resubmit the form. So in order to avoid such confusions disable the submit button only for a few seconds in a mobile website.
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Geolocation
Now a day’s all mobile devices come with GPS technology. Using this technology you can direct the users to the nearest store for purchase, you can give them targeted promotions, provide prices in their local currency and you can also connect them to the local blogs or communities.
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Keep testing
Once you have completed creating your responsive site, test it, test it and test it. Test the site on a single mobile device multiple times. Test it on different mobile devices and on different operating systems. Test every page of the site, every button, and actions of the site. When you test the site put yourself in the position of the mobile user and think what should be improved and where there is an error. This will help you to improve the site and provide a better user experience.
Conclusion
In this digital world, there is no reason for you to not to set up a mobile site for your business. Hope this article would have helped you to understand a few tips to make your mobile site user-friendly.
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