Mobile is the must-carry accessory as a wallet or watches used to be. Being used only for making emergency calls or calls to far away relatives or work to being used for watching time clicking memories checking weather predictions playing games learning any new skills building connections on social networks keeping reminders making online payments buying a simple band to big electronic to using GPS for reaching destinations, to managing office work through various applications to surveying on search engines like Google about minor to major shop or business or service, Mobile is used.
In nutshell, a Mobile serves as a personal assistant to the lifeline of a business. Since it is the ultimate tool connecting a single person or business to a broad network audience worldwide. Online presence demands a friendly interface for any business, especially on mobile irrespective of the size it is being accessed within.
Website being user friendly is a dire need based on which your website gets ranked these days by Google. Based on this, Google brought the concept of Mobile-first indexing that came into the picture in 2020 under which pages of your website are crawled by Google Bots and if any page is not optimised for mobile use as per bots evaluation, then those pages don’t appear in search results.
Henceforth, user experience and search engine robots evaluation are to be taken care of while getting your website ready for mobile optimization.
However, there are many methods of optimising your website for mobile use.
Steps to Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly
- Responsive Web Design:
Responsiveness means that your website will auto-adjust or autofit to the screen size it is being opened in, irrespective of the device size and the orientation it is being viewed in. The entire content along with website functionality should remain intact despite the user switching to different text size appearances on its mobile.
This enhances the user experience on mobile devices and further adds value to search engine optimization and helps your website in ranking index factors mentioned above.
- Different Mobile Sizes ~ Different Holding Positions
Mobile area being considerably smaller than desktop or laptop, interaction with websites also happens in a smaller area. Keeping this in mind, almost everyone uses touch-base phones today, so positioning the important options or functions of your website does matter a lot when a user visits your website.
If we consider the common holding mobile positions then the majority single hand holds their devices and uses their thumb of the same hand or finger of another hand and there are very few who use both their hands while operating mobile. You might have noticed, popular apps like Phonepe or GooglePay, have kept clickable content at the bottom or distributed their content throughout the page.
So, keeping the content to an extent which can be easily engulfed on large to smaller screens is a good strategy to be worked upon.
- Keep your Website Forms Simple
The only important fields to be filled in the form should be kept whether it is a popup or Subscription or enquiry form or contact us etc. because filling a form is quite inconvenient on mobile, looking down to the less operative space we have. Drop Down and checkbox simplifies the form-filling process, especially on Mobile.
- Scan CTA Area
The homepage is a mirror of our business or website. You can’t overload it with the content of a single category or function but we need to highlight the entire gist of functions over there which are further accessible through CTA i.e., Calls to Action represented by buttons. So, it becomes highly important that there is considerable space between clickable elements for smooth transitioning among functions.
Various types of research show that users start navigating the website from the top left corner following a zig-zag path and end up at the right corner of the website.
This determines the placement of CTAs and the spacing among more than one CTA. You will be able to attract and retain more customers if they are able to locate the options or information easily for what they have landed for.
Observing the Scanning habits of users and implementing the CTAs and clickable elements in your website accordingly plays an important role in a mobile-friendly website.
- Avoid Unnecessary Pop-Ups
You must have encountered Pop-Ups after a few seconds or minutes of opening a website. No doubt, they are excellent ways of promotions or advertisements or subscriptions or quick access to a particular function but they can be disastrous and lead to losing precious prospects if they keep on coming after every few seconds or if we are not able to close those.
Yet if it is important for you to keep a pop-up on your website, then you need to ensure that the user is easily able to locate and use the close option irrespective of the device one is using.
- Short & Crisp Content
Like Actions speak louder than words, so do pictures, graphics and icons used in the website are more self-explanatory than the lengthy paras leading to loss of viewer interest, especially the limited space we get on our mobile devices, it gets a bit tiring to keep on scrolling for the useful links. Rather the gist should be crisped in one or two-liners with short titles and clickable links, easy to engulf and accordingly action could be taken.
- Website Loading Speed on Mobile
It takes only 4 to 5 seconds for a viewer to switch to another website if your website takes more time than the said time. Therefore, we can understand the criticality of the loading time of the website as it varies according to the desktop or laptop when it comes to mobile.
Google’s PageSpeed Insights Tool is one of the best options to cross-check the loading time of the website pages for both mobile and desktop or laptop.
As the drop rate is quite high if the loading time is more, this factor could be quite detrimental when it comes to search engine optimization or user experience or ranking or indexing factor if not taken care of.
Another best approach is to keep your website lightweight with essential usage of animations on it to avoid long loading times.
Also, optimising the webpages’ loading time improves the server’s operativity and hails benefits for your domain as well.
- Responsive Images
More no. of images or images with effects we use, our website gets heavy or takes longer time to load. You might have heard of responsive websites, similarly, if you get your images optimised, specifically if responsive auto adjusts itself as per the screen size or orientation it is being viewed in then it leaves a relaxing impression in the audience’s minds which definitely impacts the lead generation rate along with improvements in rankings, user experience and even brings a positive impact on SEO in a longer run.
- Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test Tool
This is one of the free and best tools available to check if your website is mobile-friendly or not because the ranking of your website in search engines is done accordingly through Google bots as discussed above. So, after optimising your website pages for mobile devices, using Google’s Mobile Friendly test tool gives you a clear picture of the kind of issues which needs to be addressed or fixed whether it is related to page loading or appearances on mobile devices. You get the results with the issues highlighted and thus this free tool helps us in achieving the feat of mobile-friendliness.
Conclusion
There are big factors to be taken care of while optimising your webpages as per Mobile view which hold a significant impact starting from lead generation to lead conversions to pre-sales to inside sales, ultimately giving a boost to your business and fulfilling your motive of online presence and enlarging your connections at national to the global level.
