How to make your website mobile friendly

Back in October 2016, research company Statcounter established that mobile web usage had overtaken desktop for the first time ever. One year on in 2017, mobile internet traffic took up a 53% share of total global online traffic and in the UK rates were even higher – 73% of adults accessed the internet via a mobile device. So, for many organisations target users are now arriving via a mobile device, which makes mobile websites a crucial tool. Add to that the changes that Google introduced that effectively decrease the ranking in mobile search results of any website lacking mobile-friendly pages and there are some very compelling reasons to ensure your website is more mobile friendly. But how do you do it?

Responsive design is key

If you’re using responsive design for your website then it will adapt so that it is viewable on different kinds of devices. This flexibility is crucial if you want to ensure that you’re capturing and converting traffic from every possible source. Responsive design enables the site to detect the screen size of the viewer and adapt to fit it. This is a far better option than creating a separate website for mobile browsers, which is cumbersome, time consuming and can only get you into trouble with the search engines for duplicated content.

Make sure the functionality is suited to mobile

When you have a screen, as opposed to a keyboard, font size and button size suddenly matter more. Most mobile fonts should be at least 14px so that the website content is easily legible and users don’t have to expand the page to view it. Apple recommends that buttons should be at least 44px by 44px. This reduces the chances that the wrong buttons will be pressed and users will just get frustrated and bounce.

Test your mobile site constantly

What does the website look like to someone landing on it, how does the functionality operate and is it easy to navigate? If you’ve taken the time to make your website mobile friendly then don’t fall at the last hurdle and fail to test it out.

Image quality is key

You’ll need to ensure that you have high resolution images for any website but this also needs to be balanced with a size that won’t slow down page loading speeds. Mobile users are some of the quickest to bounce if websites take too long to load so make sure that you’re not overcrowding your site with oversize images and slowing it down. As a general rule, images that come in at around 2000px should still maintain image quality without impacting on loading speeds.

YouTube is a good option for video

It can be time consuming and frustrating trying to optimise videos on your website for mobile. However, if you use YouTube you can simply upload videos to the platform and you’ll get an embed code for your website that does all the hard work for you.

To find out more about how to optimise your website, contact a member of our team today on 020 7100 0726.