Is your Site Optimised for Mobile?

Smartphone addiction is a reality that digital marketers should be aware of. Today, the average consumer spends more than 5 hours a day on their smartphone, and there is now more Internet traffic coming from smartphones (52.2%) than from any other device. This means that any digital strategy that you run should be optimised for mobile.

The mobile market is only going to expand, and if you don’t keep up with this trend, you’re likely to lose leads and customers at a rapid rate. 

Optimising your site for mobile means more than creating a mobile responsive design. According to Social Media Examiner, ‘When someone is mobile, they’re expecting an entirely different experience from the one they’ll get on a standard website’.

A mobile visitor is typically searching for the core information about your business, such as a phone number or store location, so users will navigate and interact with your website completely different on a mobile device than they will on a desktop. 

The following steps can help your business optimise the user’s experience of your website on mobile.

Choose The Right Website Theme & Design

The first step in ensuring your site provides a good mobile experience, is to ensure the website theme that you choose is compatible with mobile devices. Most themes that are currently available will be optimised for use across numerous screen sizes and devices. However, it’s important to check that the theme you use for your website has this functionality. A mobile responsive theme gives your website a reliable foundation and ensures that content will be rendered properly, regardless of the device it is being viewed on. 

Once you’ve decided on the theme, the next step is to consider the design of your website. It’s important to remember that while designing an appealing and well-styled site is a priority, it’s also essential to consider how your site’s layout and content will look on different devices. For a better mobile experience, focus on maximising functionality and minimising clutter.

Other design elements to consider are as follows:

• Don’t Use Flash:  Many mobile users (such as iPhone users) can’t view Flash elements on their phones, so it’s important to remove them. HTML 5 or Java can be used instead.
• Get Rid of Pop-ups: Pop-ups are annoying for mobile users and will often frustrate them enough that they leave the site.
• Design for Mobile Use: Mobile users have to navigate your site with their finger so your design should be “finger-friendly.” This simply means ensuring that they can scroll and tap easily.

Ensure You Have A Quick Site Load Time

Smartphones typically don’t have the same loading capabilities as desktops. As such, a delay that would likely go unnoticed on a desktop could take a lot longer on a mobile device. It can only take a delay of as little as a few seconds for a user to give up waiting and leave the site.

The following can help decrease load times and improve your chances of a user converting on your site. 

• Optimise Images: Large images are one of the main things that can slow down your site, so it’s important to compress your images to the correct size for mobile.
• Minify Code: This simply means removing any unnecessary characters from the source code without changing its functionality.
• Use Browser Caching: This is the process of storing web page resource files on a local computer when a user visits a web page.
• Minimise Redirects: Try to reduce the number of redirects on your site, as a large number of redirects can cause the site to have to reload, which slows down the user’s experience.

Test Your Site

Testing the functionality of your site across devices is key to your mobile success. There are several ways that you can determine whether your site is optimised for use across different devices. The quickest and easiest way is to view the website on your own mobile device and spend some time looking around. This is an effective way to identify any obvious mistakes or flaws in your current mobile design.

There are also tools available that can tell you how responsive your website is. Google’s mobile-friendly tool is a free resource that tests your website’s responsiveness across screens. All you need to do is enter your URL, and the tool will identify any issues that are preventing your website from displaying well on mobile. For example, the tool can tell you if your text too small to read, or if clickable elements are too close together.

For more information on creating a mobile responsive design or for other digital marketing queries, don’t hesitate to get in touch with the team at Digital Squad.

On top of our SEO expertise, we are a digital marketing agency Auckland who can help you with your social media marketing Auckland, Google Shopping Auckland, Bing ads and Google display network ads. Additionally, talk to us on how your business can leverage the power of programmatic advertising Auckland, and marketing automation.