Mobile devices are the future of Internet activity, which cannot be denied as they are accurate based on their growing numbers. Over 50% of Internet access worldwide has occurred on a mobile device, and that figures are expected to rise continuously since 2015. Over two-thirds of all the digital ads, digital marketers have also caught on with the mobile ads. It has never been more critical to have a mobile-friendly website with the given facts.
How Do You Create A Mobile-Friendly Site?
Google is recently announcing its mobile-first design and indexing strategy upon agreeing to it. Instead of crawling the desktop version of the websites first, the search engine giant will now mainly use your website’s mobile version for indexing and ranking it.
Google’s old system of prioritizing crawling the desktop version of the websites is a complete turnaround. Google says that you need to seriously consider optimizing your website for mobile devices or risk your ranking suffering merely saying.
1. Installing A Responsive Theme
You can consider changing your theme entirely if you wish to have a quick fix. It is probably not the best option, but if it is a low-traffic site or just getting started, then installing a brand new responsive theme is an easy solution for an established site. Changing your theme is very easy if you are using WordPress.
Click on the themes as you head over to your WordPress dashboard, where you will find it on the themes and then install the themes. Hit search after putting it responsive. Since they have hundreds of other themes for you to choose from, this will bring up all of the themes in the WordPress database that are responsive, including the responsive theme, which is quite lovely.
You need to select the responsive one and the one that is best suited. On almost all of the devices, recheck to make sure that the theme looks good, and you should still be following the rest of the tips below to make sure that everything else is up to the mark.
2. Simplify Your Menus
Compared to the laptop or the desktop screens, the mobile screens are significantly smaller. While designing the menu options, you need to keep this in mind. It can be more extensive and have lots of options for your desktop site’s menu. But, on the smaller screen, it complicates all the things.
To check out all the navigation choices, you need not want the visitors to have to scroll or zoom in and out. Everything should fit on one screen and should be concise.
3. Keep Forms as Short as Possible
All the other different formats that you have on your website should be well-looked. It is not a practical approach if you are asking the visitor for a lot of information. To keep the forms short, you should change the design. It is not as big of an issue as it is easier to type and navigate on a larger screen if someone fills out a form on their computer. With smartphones and tablets, this is not the case here. Ask yourself whether you need each line for evaluating your forms.
You need their home addresses and phone numbers if you are trying to get users to subscribe to your email list, for instance. You need not ask the user what their favorite color is as the forms are designed for buying conversions. All you need is the billing and shipping info. One of the main reasons for shopping car abandonment is a long and complicated checkout process. You need to change your mobile website’s design if you want to reduce shopping car abandonment rates from mobile devices.
4. Display Your CTAs
Let’s speak about the conversions. Your call-to-action buttons have to be obvious to have an effective mobile web design. You need not want to overwhelm the user by squeezing more than one CTA on the screen since we are dealing with a smaller screen. For each landing page, you need to think about your goal. Might you be trying to get the downloads or new subscribers, right? You need to increase your social media presence. You also have to try and get your visitors to purchase something. On that specific goal, your CTA needs to focus.
You can get an edge over your competitors by focusing your attention on your CTA buttons. As 53% of the websites have call-to-action buttons to take the users more than three seconds to identify, it is the reason. It is too far here. In just one or a maximum of two seconds, your CTA should be easy to spot.
5. Include a Search Function
This is the design principle that can go back to what the menu options are. Some of you may have a menu with 20 or 30 different options right now. To fit on a single page, it may seem impossible to try to simplify those options. It can be done quickly if you add a search bar to your mobile site.
The need for you to rely on a large and complex menu can be reduced by encouraging users to search for what they want. A more significant number of options will be confusing the visitors and murder your conversions. To the eCommerce sites’ web design, it is a feature for sure needs to be incorporated.
6. Make Customer Service Easily Accessible
People will still have issues no matter how much time and effort you are putting into simplifying your mobile web design. Everything is a part of running a successful business and website as you need not worry about it. Being able to quickly and effectively help your mobile site visitors work through their issues here is the key here.
On your mobile site, make sure that you have got some obvious customer support information. You need to provide your social media profiles, email address, as well as your phone number. The user can contact a representative from your company as fast as possible and display anything.
To the ones that have a question or problem, you need to place yourself in their shoes. It will leave them with a wrong impression of the company if they cannot get the right help from your customer service team. It cannot go overlooked with the addition of obvious customer support information to your mobile web design.
7. Size Matters
It is simple when it comes to navigating a website from a desktop or a laptop computer. From a mouse or a keypad, you can easily control a cursor. But, it is not easy to browse with your thumbs on a 4-inch screen. While laying out different elements of your mobile site, you need to keep this in mind.
So that someone does not accidentally click the wrong ones, make sure that you keep enough space between the buttons. It will be frustrating for the mobile users visiting your website when you have to tap a similar button a lot of times. With the clickable items on the screen, you also have to keep this in mind. 75% of smartphone users use their thumbs to tap on the screen is something that you should keep in mind.
8. Eliminate Pop-ups
On your mobile site, get rid of the popups. People do not like the popups as the way it is for most of the parts. They can hinder the user experience, as they are annoying enough. They become even more of a nuisance as they are so difficult to close the main issue here with the popups on mobile devices.
People mainly use their thumbs to tap on the smaller screens to be able to recall something. Users will not close the window with a little “X” button to close a popup. While trying to close it, they might even accidentally click on the ad. To the one that would ruin their experience, they will get brought to a new landing page.
To make it easier to tap, the users at tomes will try zooming in on the close button, and the dimensions of the screen will then get messed up completely. The popups should be removed altogether. You need to promote whatever your popup is advertising as you need to develop some other ways. You need to be sure to do a lot of testing if you decide to keep a popup on your mobile site.
You need to be very careful. The user experience on mobile devices will be entirely ruined with cheap popup tools and plugins that look fine on desktop screens. You will not be able to close them as they are quite challenging to complete. They can even cause the visitors to close the window, not surprisingly instantly. You get two other solutions other than simply removing the pop up on mobile, which are the other two solutions for this issue on the mobile devices:
Solution #1 – Simplify Them:
To fill out and make them easy to close, it is one solution to make your forms as simple as possible.
It is still a better solution than sticking with whatever default popup you are currently serving, as it is probably the worst solution here.
Solution #2:
It is yet another option by only using the popups when the visitor clicks.
You may have already seen it in action if you have heard about the content upgrades. You will not be using the popups that would be coming up after a visitor spend a certain amount of time on your pages is the idea here is. To tell them to click a link to get it, you can offer them some lead magnet. The popup will then come back and ask for their information later on. As they are the ones who are asking for it, people are a lot more receptive to the popups in this situation.
9. Avoid Large Blocks of Text
From the screen of your mobile website, reduce the amount of text. You will have to use some words to communicate with your visitors and keep the sentences and paragraphs as short as possible as a matter of fact.
They are quite overwhelming and challenging to read when it comes to the larger blocks of texts. If a paragraph is two lines long on your desktop site, it might be size lines long on a smartphone is something that you should remember. Whenever you add the text to your mobile site, you need to keep these three elements in mind. Is the visitor able to comprehend your message? Where does the point of focus lie? What is their main visual hierarchy?
10. Choose the Right Font
Let us now speak about the text on your mobile site. The main design principle as well is picking the right font. They should be clear and easily read when it comes to fonts. To set two lines of text apart, you also can use the fonts. You would not want that the text of one line is running into the other’s text line.
For the headline of a section, you can use all capital letters and bold font. Then, for the line underneath to show a clear separation, use regular capitalization rules and non-bold font. You will not be able to rely on a page break or an image every time you want to have a separate text as you have got a small space to work with.
11. Prioritize Speed
You need to keep speed in mind no matter what changes you are implementing on your mobile website. 53% of the people will abandon a mobile website that takes more than three seconds to load, according to the research. Through the simplification of your design, it is the best way to keep your page loading time as low as possible.
It should not be an issue if you follow all the other principles that we have outlined. The heavy images and the flashing lights should be eliminated. There are higher conversion rates as simple websites load faster.
12. Widths Should be in Terms of Percentages
You need to be a bit technical. There are a few sorts of widths assigned to them with all the HTML elements. You can see that a panel has appeared if you are right-clicking on any element on a web page and then choose to inspect the element in Chrome. The corresponding CSS values will be displayed in the right window if you are clicking on an element in the panel’s left window.
Conclusion
There is no way around it as we live in an increasingly mobile-dominated world. Web traffic will only keep growing as phones have become more sophisticated and better suited to browse the web and the internet access that becomes more universal in our daily lives. You need to make sure that you are not losing out on valuable mobile traffic as you keep the above mobile-friendly design principles in mind.
Dilip Tiwari
Dilip Tiwari is Digital Marketing Expert at USS LLC he likes to share Tips on Digital Marketing Services, Google ads management, Amazon ads management, and other blogs ideas.