With almost 30% of traffic coming from mobile devices and over a billion people using the web on their phones, having a mobile-friendly website is worth your while. Think competitive advantage and you’re pretty much hitting the nail on the head when it comes to optimizing for mobile.
Media queries (CSS3 module allowing content to be rendered to various screen sizes) became a W3C recommended standard in June 2012 and has revolutionized web development. However, we still annoyingly find ourselves accessing web pages on our smartphones and having to scroll and zoom to find the information we need.
One of Google’s algorithm updates, Mobilegeddon, introduced in February 2015, implied that Google had made it easier for users to find mobile-friendly web pages. And although we know that this was actually just a ‘scare-tactic’ released by Google to get website owners to start improving their mobile experience, we still cannot forget about mobile users.
As mentioned previously, users are increasingly turning to their mobile devices to browse the web on major search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo. However, it is important to note that their actions and intent are very different than when browsing on a desktop, therefore ensuring that your website’s design is adaptive and responsive can give you a leg up and improve your user’s experience.
Here’s What we Know
- Your website needs to be responsive to adjust to any viewport size. Don’t waste space and cause users to have to zoom in and out to read the content that you have worked so hard on.
- Only display elements that work on all devices, failure to do so will result in unhappy visitors.
- Page load times are important. We begin to lose mobile users if the page takes more then one second to load. Simple content can help to optimize your page’s load time.
- Touch elements need to be spaced far enough apart to ensure that users get re-directed appropriately.
Tips for a Mobile-Friendly Webpage
1. If you want users to input their name or email on your webpage, let’s say, to get them to sign up for a monthly newsletter, it is important to remember to turn off autocorrect and auto capitalize accordingly. This saves users from having their names and emails auto-corrected. It also saves them from having to awkwardly caps lock and uncaps lock certain fields from their smartphones.
2. To ensure that your website’s viewport size is 100% user-friendly, don’t forget to adjust image widths to 100% and input forms to a mobile-friendly width.
3. Disable CTA’s after the first click to avoid multiple submissions. This also helps to prevent slow load times.
4. Use word wrap with long strings of characters and/or numbers to prevent users from having to scroll on their mobile devices.
5. Make sure that your site is fully navigable with one thumb.
6. Simple content and using a simple site design allows for a clear message and quick load times.
7. Javascript is your friend and your enemy. Make sure you know how to use it, and use it carefully as it runs differently across divergent browsers.
8. Turning on geolocation can improve search engine results when a nearby option is added. Information about your location provides a very functional and intuitive filter.
Tips like this can make your mobile site ULTRA user-friendly, ultimately improving things that we all love such as bounce rates and conversions! They also help you to improve your user’s experience and good mobile SEO is about putting the user’s needs first.
Curious about how mobile-friendly your website is? You can test your website’s mobile friendliness with this handy tool from Google.