With over 50% of website traffic coming from phones, having a mobile-friendly website is a key part of any marketing strategy.
Luckily, there are more than a few ways you can make sure your website isn’t missing out on that half of the market.
Simplify
When it comes to simplifying your website, the good news is that it also makes the desktop version better too. There are a few ways to make things simpler:
Design
A focused design with minimal distractions is always best. The average time-on-page across all industries is under one minute. People are in a hurry and if they aren’t seeing what they want or getting the information they need, you will lose them.
Content
Once again, we live in a world where attention must be earned. Too much text on your desktop website is bad enough, but when that transfers to a smaller screen, it’s even worse. For any text on mobile, think of a billboard. Simple and efficient.
Navigation
When designing your website, keep in mind that users should be able to fully navigate the site using only their thumb. If someone has to pinch to zoom or use their other hand to tap something, chances are they just won’t.
Speed Things Up
Are you seeing a pattern yet? Just in case you missed it: You don’t have a lot of time to capture people’s attention. If someone hops onto your website, and it takes longer than two seconds to load, you’re losing business. Each second that and your bounce rate goes up.
Here are a few ways to speed up your mobile-friendly website:
Pictures
Make sure you’re compressing any pictures on your site to a manageable size. There are many tools you can use online, like this one, that will compress your images. However, the easiest way is by simply changing the file type to a .JPEG, which offers excellent compression with minimal loss to image quality.
Video
Hosting videos directly on your site (especially high quality ones), is a one way ticket to slow loading times. It is much more effective to use a third party site, such as YouTube, to upload your videos and then simply embed them into your site.
Coding
If you aren’t using a template (which you never should anyway), your code can also slow your website down. Excessive JavaScript can mean different devices behave very differently. You have to be clever when it comes to implementing Java.
Also, Flash is generally not supported on mobile, so it’s best to avoid it.
Nuts and Bolts
There are a few more things to consider when creating a mobile-friendly website that doesn’t fit neatly into a category:
Geolocation
Making sure your customers know exactly where to find you is important. Seventy six percent of smartphone users who search for something nearby visit a related business within the day.
Love stats? Here are more SEO stats you should know.
Forms
If you have any forms on your site, make sure they’re simple and transfer well to mobile. Leap-frogging off the last point, if you can gather location data using geolocation, you don’t need to ask for it again in a form.
Clickables
This point also goes hand-in-hand with navigation. For any clickable buttons or links, make sure they can be tapped on the bottom portion of the screen, in the middle, or closer to the right (sorry lefties, but you only make up 10% of the population).
Make sure you space out your links as well. There are few things more annoying on mobile than attempting to tap a link and hitting the wrong one.
While you are now armed with a few tips, this merely scratches the surface when it comes to making a mobile-friendly website. Not only that, but mobile-friendliness is only one part of a much larger picture.
That’s where we come in.
Siva is a marketing agency that makes ludicrously kick-ass websites that convert with a strategy-first approach to everything we do.
Does your website or social media stack-up? Find out with our free audit.
