Introduction to Mobile-Friendly Website
Mobile internet users have doubled in the past two years, resulting from Google algorithms including 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 mobile devices. Mobile internet users have crossed the desktop users, so having a mobile-friendly website is necessary.
What is a Mobile-Friendly Website?
Just because your site can be viewed on mobile does not mean that your site is mobile-friendly.
A mobile-friendly website is developed and optimized so that every user, irrespective of the type of mobile device 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
- We design the elements of the site to simplify its usage.
- Contents modified according to the mobile consumption
- Click-to-call functionality is 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 ensure your mobile customers have a good experience with your site, follow the suggestions or tactics below.
1. 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 on 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 two different pieces of information are available. And you can also pick out the important elements of the desktop site to be added to the mobile site.
2. 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 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 many SEO benefits.
3. 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 a mobile-friendly website without the need to create two versions of the site separately for desktop and mobile. They also have additional methods to customize the mobile site and include the best features to be used on mobile devices to give the user the best experience.
4. Think with your thumb
Make sure that your site has easy navigation between the pages of your site with one thumb. 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 in by the viewers. If the users need to zoom the contents, then it means that the contents are not perfectly optimized for the mobile device.
5. Font and buttons size matters
Another important factor 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. The 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.
6. Simple design
Neat and simple mobile-friendly web pages can go a long way. You have 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 use images on your site, use them in smaller byte sizes.
7. 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. Compared to desktops, mobile devices have much smaller screens, So they include only the important contents of a mobile site. Mobile users also scroll down quickly, so include contents that are very attractive to them.
8. Include a viewport meta tag
Internet browsers use the viewport meta tag to determine 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. You can also configure your viewport to control a lot of other things.
9. Optimize the images
High-resolution images are more important for a responsive site to give the user 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 mobile devices. The latest models of mobiles require images that 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 enhance user experience.
10. 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 remember that overloading the JavaScript will affect your site’s performance.
11. Provide your business information
Mobile users often lookout for contact information. So provide your phone number, location, and contact information. You can also use a map to locate your nearest store.Providing users a call to action or an email form will be an added advantage.
12. 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 in exploring more about your business. So if you constrain them, then it means that you are losing a potential customer of your business.
13. 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 video technology that 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 to improve your page speed. YouTube is the best option for adding videos to your site. YouTube uses responsive embedded code, which is why this is the case. So using YouTube for your mobile site can make the site user-friendly and can offer a better user experience.
14. Design the forms for mobile
Make your form short and simple. See-through that the form requires only the minimum amount of user information. We should keep the number and size of the form fields to a minimum level. But improve the technology to get the maximum usability of the form. For example, If you can track the user’s location, don’t ask them to enter their city, state, and pin code.
15. Set form input attributes
If you have a form asking the users to enter their name, turn off the autocorrect and turn on the auto-capitalize option. If you don’t make such changes to the form attributes, the phone will change the user’s name to something else if it is not found in the dictionary. If you ask the user to give their email id, use the email input field in your form attribute so that the @ symbol automatically appears on the keyboard. This will help the user to enter the details with ease, and it will also make them more engaged with the site.
16. Avoid fixed position
If your website has a header or sidebar with a CSS property set to the fixed position, then know that when a user zooms in, that particular header or sidebar also zooms in. This collapses the look of the site. So make sure you disable the fixed position when creating a mobile site.
17. Use extra spaces with caution
When you want to display a long string of numbers to the users, split them into 5-letter groups with a space 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. This method will work out best on a desktop 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 them into another document, the spaces will not appear. This saves time and effort.
18. Be careful when disabling submit buttons
Some websites may deactivate the submit buttons in forms after submission. We do this to avoid multiple submissions. When you enable this option for your mobile site, you will have many problems. Because the mobile networks are too poor and frequently disrupted, the user might also get a call while submitting the form. In such cases, mobile users cannot resubmit the form. So in order to avoid such confusion, disable the submit button only for a few seconds on a mobile website.
19. 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, give them targeted promotions, provide prices in their local currency, and connect them to local blogs or communities.
20. Keep testing
Once you have completed creating your responsive site, test it and test it. Test the site on a single mobile device multiple times. Test it on different mobile devices and different operating systems. Test every page of the site, every button, and action of the site. When you test the site, put yourself in the mobile user’s position and think about 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 not to set up a mobile site for your business. Hope this article has helped you to understand a few tips to make your mobile site user-friendly.
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