However, it is more than just creating a website for your business. Since most users are now smartphone owners, another factor to consider is its compatibility with the interface of mobile devices. An article reports that 79% of online searches now come from mobile devices, and mobile traffic has drastically increased since 2016. With these statistics, online store owners must also consider developing a mobile-friendly web design.

Why Having a Mobile-Responsive Web Design Matters

Here are other five (5) reasons why having a mobile-responsive web design matters:

Good User Experiences

No customer enjoys a complex and confusing way of making a purchase. Hence, as an online store owner, investing in a good interface must be a priority as it can convert prospects into customers. A mobile-responsive web design guarantees a positive experience in navigating your platform to its visitors as it can: (1) display all the necessary information about your services and products, (2) provide access to all menus and buttons; and (3) show the best graphics and image resolution for references.

Flexible

A well-developed mobile design website gives you the easiest way to support and run the latest releases of devices smoothly. It is important to take note that not all mobile devices are built the same, and screen sizes and resolutions differ. Hence, you need to consider the compatibility of your website to different operating systems. Having a flexible and responsive website allows you to save time in updating and tweaking errors every time a new device launches. 

Improved SEO

In the competitive online business setting, search engine optimisation (SEO) is one of the strategies used to boost a website’s ranking in Google’s search page. The more you enter relevant keywords to your website, the more users can potentially click on your page as it ranks higher on Google’s search ranking. 

A developed mobile website design heavily contributes to an improved ranking as Google considers all websites’ responsiveness to integrate into its algorithm. With the high traffic from mobile devices nowadays, Google opted to index mobile searches to ease the load and avoid crash downs. So if your website is not mobile-friendly, there is a risk of being placed lower on search pages.

Easy Management

When your business runs two different versions of a website, there is a division and additional work for your team. However, with a flexible and mobile-responsive web design, your workforce can work altogether in building awareness and content development for your business. The tasks are aligned and provide a clear rundown of your business’ offerings. Moreover, with a responsive mobile website design, the online presence is consolidated, and optimisation is much easier to achieve. Your marketing personnel does not have to select target audiences for mobile and non-mobile visitors manually.

Cost Effective

A mobile-responsive web design is like hitting two birds with one stone. Rather than only investing in a dual website for mobile and non-mobile visitors, it is better to develop a flexible website design that caters to both save money and time in the long run. The updates, bug fixes, and other sorts of maintenance tasks can be done in one go. Hassles from piled expenses can be avoided. You can also focus on the core areas of your business.

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There are a lot of benefits that you can get if you have a user-friendly website design. Companies or business owners that invest in user-friendly website designs often get more engagement because there is increased activity on their pages. If you are an entrepreneur, your main goal is to profit from whatever service or product you introduce to the market. It is advantageous to those that utilize mobile-friendly websites since it is easier to convert leads into sales.

How Do We Design Our Mobile Website To Be More User-Friendly?

A mobile-friendly website design is key to providing users with a positive experience on your site no matter what device they are using. Here are some tips to keep in mind when designing your mobile website:

1. Responsive Layout

A responsive layout adjusts or adapts according to the size of the user’s device. The development and design of the web should respond to the user’s environment and behavior based on the platform, orientation, and size of the screen. Usually, developers use a combination of layouts, flexible grids,  and images.

Another technique used by developers to achieve a responsive layout is media query. Media queries enable content rendering to adapt to various settings, such as automatically resizable graphics and changing screen resolutions.

Screen orientation, such as portrait or landscape mode, is a common feature of mobile devices. Thus, designers need to create a fluid and flexible website. Designers opt to create sliding composite images, reveal, or hide portions of images, or forefront images that scale with the layout.

2. Optimize Website Speed

Website speed is important in setting a good impression for your website. That is why the majority of users leave a website if the page is unresponsive or takes too long to load. In addition, negative effects such as low engagement and low conversions rates are common if you have a slow website speed. Hence, developers should consider optimizing their website speed to promote a mobile-friendly website design.

Here are the best ways you can optimise your website speed:

• Adopt cloud-based website monitoring
• Pick the right hosting Service plan
• Optimise image sizes
• Minimise the number of HTTP requests
• Lessen the number of plugins
• Switch to HTTP/2
• Make use of content delivery network (CDN)
• Utilise website caching
• Write mobile-first code

If your business heavily relies on your website to communicate with customers, it can be difficult to improve website performance. However, web optimisation will surely boost your business.

3. Avoid Pop-Ups

What are pop-ups on websites? Website popups are windows that automatically “pop up” into your display without the user’s explicit consent. Pop-ups can inform users such as agreeing to use a cookie.  

Try to remove popups from your website. On a computer, it’s simple to show a popup that doesn’t take up the full screen, and it’s simple for people to click the ‘X’ and continue browsing if they are not interested. However, a phone works differently.

Blocking mobile pop-ups can be quite difficult. Even if you make the ‘X’ big enough to be clickable, it’s not always easy to find on such a small screen, and users often accidentally click the popup itself. Mobile pop-ups are more likely to frustrate users. 

4. Improve Text Inputs

One of the major inconveniences to mobile accessibility are text inputs. A word or two here and there is not a major inconvenience, but who wouldn’t complain if a mobile site requests an email address and then makes you use one hand to cycle through the alphabet, capitalization, punctuation, and symbol menus? It is both too draggy and complicated for the user. That is why you should reduce form fields as much as you can.

5. Readable Fonts and Text Size

Texts and content should go together in mobile web designs. The readability of a website’s text or web typography prioritises formatting and fonts to create a smooth reading experience for its users. Ideal text size, fonts, and typeface are the few factors that determine the accessibility and readability of websites.

Common fonts such as Arial, Calibri, Helvetica, Tahoma, Times New Roman, and Verdana are generally more readable than others. It is important to choose readable fonts because you can help the user to understand your message and get the information they need quickly.

Conclusion

Always remember that your goal in creating a mobile-friendly website design is to provide the best possible experience for the users, regardless of the device they’re using. The five tips mentioned above will not only improve your website, but it will boost your business big time. So, enjoy business growth through added lead conversions, engagements, and page awareness by creating your own mobile-friendly website today!

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Lo and behold, 2018 is the year that Google is making it official by launching a mobile-first index algorithm, ultimately making mobile sites and pages as the main basis for indexing and ranking.

So what does this all mean? Simply put, the mobile version of your site should be your main priority because it’s what Google will use to assess your ranking in search engines. Sounds scary? A bit. But is it a surprising move on Google’s part? Not at the very least.

This has long been an expected update from Google. The tables have finally turned and mobile sites aren’t just an afterthought anymore; it’s become the priority.  

With all that said, it’s pretty easy to determine your proper course of action, which is to focus on improving (or creating, if you don’t have one yet!) the mobile version of your site. We’re listing down important steps in preparing your site for Google’s Mobile-First Index. The first step? Don’t panic and just read on.

Step #1: Ensure that your site is truly optimised for mobile browsing

More than being mobile-friendly, your site has to be mobile-optimised.

There’s actually a difference between the two. Saying that your site is mobile-friendly means that you have a working mobile version of the site, meaning you can simply view your site using a mobile device. However, saying that it is optimised for mobile means that it offers a seamless user experience and has a truly responsive mobile design.

Having a mobile-optimised site doesn’t just mean that you have a shrunken or slightly rearranged version of your site. It means that your users would be able to navigate your site with the same ease (or more!) as they do with the desktop version.

Good news is a lot of website platforms provide an automatic mobile version of the site. However, it would still be best to make sure that it’s the best possible design for mobile and not just a slightly adjusted version. This is why a lot of developers opt to build it from scratch to ensure that they hit the mark in mobile-responsiveness.

To check if your mobile site is up to par, you can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test as a starting point. They’ll either say that your site is mobile-friendly or come up with a report that would highlight the main points for improvement and repair.

Step #2: Adjust content for mobile viewing

It’s not enough to simply adjust the design. You may also have to look at how you craft your content and see if it works as effectively for mobile viewing as well.

Content remains king and one way of how marketers deal with this is by coming up with at least a thousand, or even three, words and complete with supporting images and graphics. The thing is, these highly informative and wordy content may seem fine to look at on a desktop screen but doesn’t translate as smoothly to a mobile screen. One remedy to this issue is to slightly adjust how you write. It doesn’t mean that you have to shorten your posts. Perhaps you can cut them up into shorter paragraphs and sentences, as opposed to piling it all up in lengthy chunks.

Google’s mobile-first index shouldn’t push you into a corner and restrict you from coming up with quality content. Remember that quality content remains a strong ranking factor above everything else.

What this algorithm update should do is to push you into paying more attention on how your desktop site and pages translate to mobile. This applies not just to text content, but also to images, graphics, videos, and other content formats.

Step #3: Consider other mobile-first index factors

Achieving a seamless user experience with your mobile site comprises of several factors that come into play. It’s not simply about the display or adjusted layout. There are other mobile-first index factors that you strongly pay attention to. These include the following:

• Site speed: Did you know that Google has stated that 53% of mobile users would leave a site if it takes more than three seconds to load? This makes site speed an even more important factor for mobile browsing. To check on how your mobile site is faring, you can go ahead and do so using Google’s PageSpeed Insights. It’ll give you a clear idea if your site is on the safe zone or if it requires major speed improvement.
• Intrusive interstitials: Interstitials are what you call those pesky pop-ups that come up when you visit a site. It’s described as “a page that is inserted in the normal flow of editorial content structure on a website for the purpose of advertising or promotion.” Google has cited that there’s an existing intrusive interstitial penalty–and trust us when we say that’s something you don’t want to receive. You may want to reconsider adding interstitials or perhaps adjusting its size or frequency.
• Sources of mobile site traffic: Remember that with the launch of the mobile-first index, where your mobile site traffic comes from would matter even more since it would also affect your desktop site ranking. Apart from using social media to drive click-throughs and traffic to your mobile site, you can also consider using guest posts, videos, podcasts, email newsletters, influencer marketing, PPC, Quora, and so on.
• Link building: Backlinks still matter. And it also matters if these are quality or spammy backlinks. Apart from consistently checking to see who links back to your site, it would also help to monitor who links back to your competitors and use that information to create your own linking strategy as well. Of course, also make sure to get rid of bad links to avoid getting penalized by Google.
• Schema markup: Having a schema markup is your way of helping Google understand what the content of your site/page means. A schema markup is described as a “code [semantic vocabulary] that you put on your website to help search engines return more informative results for users.” This is something that should be added to the backend of your site to ensure that Google recognizes what your data means, not just what it says.

Conclusion

As we’ve already said, there’s no reason to panic because you still have time. But that time is getting shorter with each day and if you still haven’t gotten around to at least having a mobile-friendly version of your site, then it’s high time that you make the move.

Should you have a mobile-friendly version, then kudos to you! But the job’s not done yet. Your goal is to truly optimise it for mobile browsing by paying attention to several factors that affect user experience.

Make the most out of the time we’re all waiting for Google to finally launch the Mobile-First Index to focus on making several adjustments and improvements on your mobile site.

Simply put, prioritize your mobile site starting now and by the time Google announces its launch, your site is up and ready to rule the search engine rankings on both mobile and desktop.

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