Making sure you have a mobile friendly website has never been more important than it is today. Mobile traffic has been catching up with that of desktop early in 2016; in other words, we’re in the midst of a massive shift in how people access the web from desktop computers to smartphones and tablets. Additionally, Google recently has changed its search algorithm to give mobile friendly websites a ranking boost. As a website owner, you need to adapt to the new paradigm as soon as possible; otherwise, your website is very possible to be invisible to the majority of your visitors.
But before dive into how to make a mobile friendly website efficiently, we would like to suggest you leverage the Google Mobile Friendly Test tool to see how much your website needs to be improved. And to figure out what type of mobile devices your website visitors mostly make use of, you can use a data analytic tool such as Google Analytics. Then you can have your website optimized for certain device screens under the guidance of the data.
Ready? Go!
Tip 1. Create a mobile version of your website
Taking advantage of a mobile builder like goMobi or Duda Mobile must be the quickest way to create a mobile version of your desktop site. Such platforms can always provide you with a set of beautifully designed templates, plenty of great layouts for mobile phones, and enable you to apply larger screen layouts to your website with ease.
Despite the extremely simplified process the mobile website builder brings your website into compliance, you’re required to have two separate websites. Namely, you have to manage two sites simultaneously, including the updates, security and more. Even worse, your customers or readers may get frustrated when they find less information available on the mobile version than the desktop; or, vice versa.
Tip 2. Utilize a mobile plugin on a CMS platform
Things become much easier if you’re using any one of the most popular CMS platforms, including WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. Instead of requiring you to have two separate websites, these solutions make it possible for your website to be mobile-friendly by incorporating other features best used on mobile devices.
Take WordPress as an example, you can attain responsiveness and mobile-friendliness by installing the WPtouch plugin. It will automatically display an elegant mobile theme when your websites are visited from mobile, so does when Google does its website Mobile test so that your website could get a good seo ranking for its mobile-friendly feature.
Likewise, if you’re building a website on the Joomla platform, the Responsivizer extension is highly recommended to you; and for a Drupal website, the ThemeKey module can fully fit your requirements for a responsive design for different auto-detected mobile devices.
Tip 3. Customize a mobile responsive design
To deploy a mobile-first strategy, you need to implement some responsive web design practices.
1.Font size and button size are important for a mobile website
It is a terrible experience to press the wrong button because of its too small size. So, ensure the buttons are as big as possible. If you have no idea about how big it is enough to maximize user experience and increase conversion on a mobile website, keep it at least 44px by 44px as some mobile leaders suggest.
As to font size, the most important rule is making the content easy for viewers to read without needing them to zoom in for legibility. In general, font size on a mobile website should be at least 14px, except for font on labels or forms that can drop back to 12px.
2.Images should be scaled to appropriate dimensions
In addition to keep high-resolution images, it’s also of great importance to verify them scale correctly when viewers browse in portrait and landscape orientation. If they don’t, you can customize the images to have widths of 100% or contain them in the page by changing the CSS rules.
3.Restructure the page display
It can optimize user experience to remove unnecessary content and simplify the website design. Avoid the inclusion of tablets, frames, and other formatting are all good methods to let viewers navigate the website with zero difficulty.
As well, breaking up the page into small sections can prevent frustrating horizontal scrolling. If a section of text seems too lengthy, place them on several different pages is also good, because no people is willing to continuously scroll down to view the content.
The above tips are so simple that even you are a non-tech savvy can follow to create a mobile-friendly website. However, no matter which screen you display your website, page loading time and uptime play a significant role for user experience above all. In other words, ensuring your website is hosted with a reliable web hosting provider should be the first and foremost factor to consider. If you still haven’t yet, visit www.bisend.com to check out what a reliable web hosting solution could be.
