Why is a mobile-friendly website so important?
With an estimated 2.7 billion smartphone users worldwide, using it on an average 3 hours and 15 minutes per day, its more important now than ever to have a mobile-friendly website.
It’s also not surprising to know that, due to the vast number of internet users now using mobile devices, Google has been favouring mobile-friendly website for a number of years over those that are not mobile-friendly in search results. Back in July 2018, Google released an algorithm update essentially stating that websites will now be indexed based on its mobile version and those that are fully optimized for mobile will rank better than those who don’t – simple.
It’s more than likely that your website has already been moved over to mobile-first-indexing, however, if you’re unsure, check your messages in the Google Search Console for a notification. Another signal that suggests your site has moved over is that Google will also label your site as last crawled by the Googlebot smartphone user-agent which can be found in the URL inspection tool.
If you haven’t optimized your mobile site already, and you’re now left wondering what you can do to ensure your mobile site is performing as it should be, then follow our 7 steps below on how to make your website mobile-friendly:
MAKE YOUR WEBSITE MOBILE RESPONSIVE:
A responsive website includes all the same content and information on any device you access it on, but it changes the way it’s displayed and and arranged based on the size of the device screen. This is the best option for making your website mobile-friendly, because you’re not limiting the information your mobile visitors can access- they still get all the same content the rest of your visitors do. And responsive design is also good for SEO. Google has said it’s their preferred format for mobile websites.
You may think you may can’t build a responsive website on your own. But, as responsive design has become the norm, there are many tools to make it possible. Check out top 20 tools for responsible web design.
And the super easy way? All design templates in our drag- and- drop website builder are already optimized for mobile.
ALWAYS INCLUDE A VIEW PORT MEGA TAG:
If you’re unfamiliar with this term, the browser’s view port is the area of the window in which content on a webpage can be seen.
The viewport mega tag is an easy way to control how your website shows up on mobile. If your page opens up as the same width on the small screen of your phone as it does on the desktop, you’re going to have to do some awkward scrolling from side to side to read each line of text and see the different sides of the page. The viewport mega tag tells browsers to fit the width of your page to the screen of the device type the visitor is coming from.
Adding this it to your html is simply easy. Just paste this onto the html for each page:
<meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1″>
IMPROVE PAGE SPEED:
Page speed is one of the areas where technical SEO can have a real and immediate impact on organic performance and is increasingly important as Google prioritises mobile search.
Since the Google Speed Updates was first announced on January 2018, they used it as a way to penalise sites with slow mobile pages. Webmasters, SEO, developers and site owners then had several months to react and improve their website performance before the algorithm update fully rolled out in July 2018.
There are number of ways to improve page speed such, the main fundamentals can simply be found by running your through Google’s own Page Speed tool: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/.
DON’T USE FLASH:
It’s important that your mobile site doesn’t run using Flash as it is not mobile friendly and it’s bad for SEO. It isn’t licensed for most mobile browser, it is also officially shutting down in 2020 so if any of your content is only accessible on Flash, it’s time to get it swapped over before it’s too late. Google highly recommend that you use HTML 5 instead to ensure your website content works across both mobile and desktop browsers.
COMPRESS YOUR IMAGES AND CSS:
Speaking of site loading time, you always want your site speed to be fast. But if anything, that speed is more important on mobile. That means another good step for making your website more friendly is to compress anything that takes up a lot of space now and slows loading time.
That probably includes your high- resolution images and your CSS. By compressing them, you can ensure fast loader without negatively affecting the quality of what people see on the site.
ALLOW AN EASY WAY TO SWITCH TO DESKTOP VIEW:
Some of your mobile visitors may actually prefer to see the desktop version of your website instead .
Make sure you give them way to do that if it’s their preference. You want your visitors to be able to interact with your website in the way that makes the most sense for them.
REGULARLY PERFORM MOBILE TESTING:
The best thing you can do to make sure your website’s mobile experience is a good one is to regularly test it out yourself on your mobile device. Every so often, pull up your website on your phone and tablet and spend sometime browsing to see if anything’s hard to see or difficult to do. Ask your employees to do the same, and consider hiring users to do testing as well.
USE LARGE FONT SIZES:
Reading on a small screen is that much harder if the font is tiny. It’s best size to use a font size of at least 14px on your web pages, but go ahead and test out how that looks to see if going bigger could be better here.
MAKE YOUR BUTTON SIZES LARGE ENOUGH TO WORK ON MOBILE:
It’s simply easy to click on any button sizes with mouse, but if you’re trying to click using your fingers that could be difficult. If there are numerous small sizes of buttons and you’re trying to click on one and the other one get opens which is really annoying for your visitors.
The best way to overcome from this problem is to use bigger size of buttons. Any time you add a button to your site, take some time to test them out yourself on however many mobile devices you can scrounge up amongst your employees and family. Make sure selecting each button is reasonably easy to operate on all the devices and, if it’s not update it so that is;
TURN AUTO CORRECT FOR FORMS:
Something it’s easy not to think about the little ways auto-correct can make a user’s interaction with your website more inconvenient. If you have forms on your website that ask for name or address information, one small way you can make providing that information easier on your mobile visitors is to turn off auto-correct for each form filled.
In the input field, make sure you include auto-correct=off in the html.
SWITCH TO A BETTER THEME:
Of course, since you’re using WordPress, the easiest method to make your website mobile friendly is to upgrade to a better theme. Simply buy a modern WordPress theme that comes with a mobile-friendly design and replace your old theme.
CONCLUSION:
Even if you get everything right today, the way mobile devices look and work will continually change and today’s mobile friendly website may not still do the job tomorrow. Keep testing, keep tweaking where needed and continue to think about your mobile users as a priority and you should be fine.
If you need any kind of further information or help, Digital Manohar team is ready to solve your problems. You are just one step back contact us and get solution of all your every problems.