Today we continue our Black Friday Bootcamp to show you how to make sure your website is Mobile-friendly and fast.

The reason we want a mobile-friendly website is because mobile devices accounted for over one-third of ALL sales transactions in 2015.

The name of the game for Black Friday and holiday shopping is to maximize every single visitor. This means we need to ensure our website is optimized for mobile devices.

In addition, Google reports that 77% of mobile searches occur at home or work, places where desktop computers are likely to be present. And I think it’s safe to assume that people will be shopping from the office for this holiday season.

If you’ve not updated your website in a few years, my guess is that you could use a few tweaks to be mobile friendly.

Step 1 – Check Your Existing Site(s)

The first thing we need to do is head over to Google and run a check on your existing website.

You can do that here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly

With any luck, your website will already be mobile-friendly and you’ll see the following message per screenshot below. If so, I’ll see you in our next Black Friday Bootcamp article!

If by any chance you were hit with the following message, there’s a few things we can do to make it mobile friendly.

Assuming that your website is not mobile – think we can remove this line entirely.

Step 2 – How Did You Create Your Site(s)?

In order for us to fix the mobile-friendly problem, we need to know how your website was built.

How was your website built?

• Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress, Joomla!, or Drupal
• Someone else built the website
• I built the website myself and understand coding

I’ll go over a plan of action for each of the above.

Assuming you used Wordpress (the most popular CMS), your road to becoming mobile-friendly is rather easy.

WordPress Mobile Websites

First thing you need to do is make sure your WordPress installation is fully up to date. Contact the Superb Internet’s support guru’s if you need help updating WordPress.

If you wish to update WordPress on your own, login to WordPress for the website you wish to make mobile-friendly.

Once logged in, look under the “Home” link for “Updates.” This will be in the top left corner of your WordPress dashboard.

Once you have located the “Updates” link, click it.

You will then be taken to a new page where you will be told what updates you need.

Once you are up-to-date, your website should be mobile-friendly.

You can re-check your website using the Google Mobile check:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly

If you still don’t pass, we can install plugins that will fix everything for us.

Generally, updating WordPress should resolve it. But if your website is still not mobile-friendly then your theme is most likely causing the problem. We can perform a work around by installing the following plugins:

• Install the Jetpack plugin from WordPress
• Install WPTouch WordPress plugin. This will create a separate, mobile-friendly version of your website. Your desktop theme will remain the same.

And most current theme’s (if not all) are mobile-friendly for WordPress.

Now, if you are using an alternate CMS, you can visit the following links for more help:

• Joomla!
• Drupal
• vBulletin

You may ask, “What if someone else has built my website?”

Website(s) Built By A Web Designer Or Programmer

You’ll need to contact your web designer to see if they are capable of making your existing site mobile-friendly. With that said, there are a few things you need to keep in mind when choosing a web developer for this project:

1. Make it easy for customers. Show them what they want and make it easy for them to take action.
2. Design for all devices using responsive design. Tablets, phones, desktops.
3. Use the same domain, don’t place your mobile site on a sub-domain. This just increases work and confusion.
4. Ask for references and a portfolio of mobile websites.
5. Make sure your mobile site loads quickly. 4 seconds or less is the general rule of thumb given to us by Google.

But what if you built the site yourself?

I Built The Website Myself

If you understand HTML coding, congrats! You’ll be able to knock this all out on your own.

The good thing is, Google has a checklist you can go over when designing your website here.

I’ll be back in a day or two and we’ll start doing the fun stuff and I’ll give you a few idea’s so you can organize a plan for Black Friday so your sales don’t evaporate.

The post Don’t let 33% of customers fall through the cracks appeared first on Superb Internet.