There are far more Mobile device users than you could ever imagine. Last year, there were almost 15 billion mobile devices worldwide, and it’s slowly increasing each year.

This trend did not occur suddenly. In fact, mobile devices began to explode in 2014. After a couple of years, mobile devices took over computer usage. Over half of website traffic was derived from smartphone users.

Although there are still viewers who use their computers to go online, most of your visitors are viewing your website on a small device. This means that opting for a mobile-friendly website in 2022 and beyond is no longer an option.

Businesses must keep their websites flexible to any Screen size. Having an adaptable site helps build brand awareness, SEO ranking on search engines, and revenue.

So, how can you turn your website into a mobile-friendly version?

Steps to Make a Mobile-Friendly Website

Check If  You Have a Mobile-Friendly Website

The website builder you chose could have kept the mobile experience top of mind if your website was created or modified within the last few years. But, you can check to evaluate how your website performs before investing a lot of time and money into making it mobile-friendly.

Google offers a tool for checking mobile-friendliness. Besides receiving a prompt response regarding whether you have mobile-friendly website, you will also receive a screenshot of how the page appears on a smartphone screen and a list of suggestions for improving the mobile user experience.

Making your website mobile-friendly should be given high attention if the tool indicates that it needs a lot of work. By doing this, you will enhance conversions on your website, ensuring that more visitors stay on your site, and improve its exposure in search engines.

If Google’s tool recommends you, you don’t need to give updating your website for mobile the same amount of attention. However, you might still gain from thinking about how to improve your users’ mobile experience. Each little bit counts.

Make Your Webpage Responsive

A responsive website is an ideal approach to constructing a site that functions effectively on both desktop and mobile devices. A responsive website adjusts to the device it’s being presented on and optimizes its design accordingly. However, it contains the same information and content on any device you view it on.

In other words, a page’s arrangement and presentation depend on the size of the device’s screen. For example, when loaded on a smartphone, an image that displays beside a text on a desktop may appear above it.

With responsive design, your website becomes easy to browse without restricting the information that mobile users can view. They still have access to all of the same content as your other visitors.

You can easily hire a developer to create a responsive site or choose website builders that offer flexible templates. Most website builders today require no coding skills.

Remove Pop-ups and Text-blocking Ads

It’s particularly frustrating when you’re trying to read content on a small screen and a large ad or pop-up covers your view of the website. If this happens, the majority of your visitors will simply click away and visit another website.  

Avoid permitting pop-ups or adverts that obscure page content if you want to improve user experience. If you think they are essential, you can at least disable this function on mobile users. Or, you can let it show up only when the visitor is at the bottom of the page.

Optimise Image Size

Image optimization is one of the most beneficial things you can do for your website. Your mobile website may become unusable due to a single inefficient image. Consider the changes to ensure you can allow your site to load on small screens in about tens of seconds.

• Resize: Choose images with lower size or set a limit to the file size you upload
• Hide big images: You can create a smaller version or hide them for mobile users to prevent slowing down.
• Compress: Low-quality images are not obvious on small devices, as the speed matters more.
• Lazy load: The image will only load when users pass through it.

There are online tools you can use that will help you choose the quality of your image. In addition, there’s also a tool that can compress and optimize all the images on your site at once.

Don’t Block Javascript, CSS, and Image Files

Although not perfect, Java is a commonly used platform that, along with CSS and image files, forms the basis of a responsive website.

Trying to make your website widely compatible should be one of your key objectives. It should be readable on almost any device. The less likely it is that anything will work with your site, the more specialized it is.

Choose Simple Designs

On any screen, complex websites with lots of clutter are perplexing, but they make it particularly difficult for users to browse. Therefore, eliminate clutter.

Maintain a simple, straightforward layout that makes it simple for users to find what they’re looking for. Additionally, a basic design will help pages load more quickly because of fewer files on each page that needs to be downloaded.

Use this approach when creating your menu. A wide menu on desktop screens may make sense if your website has a lot of pages and categories. On a mobile device, though, you should limit it to the most crucial choices.

Optimise the Speed

The speed of your website will matter. A fast web hosting and server quality must be reliable and can run your website at optimal speed.

The quantity of content pages dictates the need for additional plugins to execute is another factor to optimize your site’s speed. When it comes to the home page, this is especially accurate.

• Use Accelerated Mobile Pages: It will speed up the loading time of your page on mobile screens.
• Reduce the number of articles on the home page. Make it around 5 to 10 posts only.
• Get rid of unnecessary widgets.
• Remove inactive plugins
• Reduce image size and CSS

Enlarge Buttons on Mobile

Clicking buttons on a desktop or laptop is easy. However, on a smartphone that’s another thing, particularly if there are multiple buttons to choose from.

Use a bigger button to avoid frustration on the part of your viewers. In addition, place them on a part that’s recognizable and also uncomplicated. Test them to see if they work and if they are exactly where they should be placed.

Use Readable Fonts

Fonts can be heavy, like images. When loading non-standard fonts, your website will take longer to load and will be less user-friendly for mobile users.

On a desktop, using a font size of at least 14 pixels is advised; however, you should test it out on your mobile version first in case it appears too small and you need to increase the size.

Also double-check your font’s readability. On a laptop, it’s one thing to experiment with a more daring typeface, but this choice is unlikely to be successful on the phone. Nevertheless, you should try to maintain fonts consistent across all platforms.

You have considerably less area to deal with when developing a mobile version of your website. On a desktop, you can use line breaks and graphics to break up the text. To prevent text from blending on mobile, try bolding or capitalizing individual lines of text instead.

Add Viewport Meta Tag

It’s simple to manage how your website appears on mobile devices by using the viewport meta tag. You will have to painfully scroll to read each line of text and view the various sides of the page if your page opens up with the same width on the little screen of your phone. The viewport meta element instructs browsers to resize your website so that it fits the width of the screen being used by the visitor’s device.

Perform Mobile Testing Regularly

Testing your website frequently on a mobile device is the best way to ensure that it provides a positive mobile experience. Check your website on your phone and tablet every so often to see if any areas are difficult to see or navigate.

The greatest approach to finding little problems that make your visitors’ experience worse is through routine testing. You can change your website to offer a completely mobile-friendly experience the quicker you become aware of them.

Keep Forms Simple

Forms are essential to gather leads for your marketing campaigns. They work effectively on desktops or larger screens. However, on smaller screens, that’s another thing.

When long and complex forms are displayed on smaller screens, they will appear even more complex and may overwhelm users. Additionally, because mobile users have a shorter attention span, you should make forms as brief as possible by only requesting the absolute necessities.

Don’t forget to make call-to-action buttons big and obvious so users don’t need a stylus to press them.

Give Users a Way to Change to Desktop View.

Some of your mobile visitors might choose to view your website’s desktop version rather than the mobile version, therefore, give them that option. You want your website’s visitors to be able to interact with it whenever it makes the most sense to them.

Conclusion

Making your website accessible to all devices will help you build better brand awareness, increase traffic, and rank high on search engines. However, you need to make sure to make some changes to allow your website to adapt.

In addition, making your website mobile-friendly is not a one-time event. It requires you to check your website’s appearance, performance, and overall function. No matter how tedious it is, the outcome of maintaining a mobile-friendly website will always pay off.

We offer website builder software that can help you design a website even without coding skills. Check out Softvire NZ today and have a mobile-friendly and responsive website in just a few clicks.

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