Why it’s still important to optimise your website for mobile and how to do this

Mobile is now officially more popular than desktop when it comes to the way consumers today choose to go online. Given that the number of smart phone users is set to grow to 2.5 billion in 2019 it’s perhaps not surprising that mobile is such a crucial channel for marketers and businesses. Ensuring that your website is optimised for mobile – and designed in a way that will enable your business to capture more mobile consumers – is going to be key. So, how do you do it?

Is your website mobile ready?

Mobile traffic has overtaken desktop or laptop traffic in many locations around the world. For example, in countries such as India, the volume of mobile traffic is at least four times greater than desktop/laptop traffic. So, it’s crucial for any brand today to ensure that a website is set up to cope with mobile users.

Mobile users expect websites to be fast

In fact, according to Google, as soon as a page load time increases from one second to three seconds, the probability of losing a mobile visitor increases by a third.

Smart phone use has created an expectation of availability 24/7

We check our phones last thing at night and first thing in the morning – and we expect the websites of the brands we interact with to provide what we need day and night too.

Customers research on mobiles

We use mobile browsing for just about everything now, even when it relates to in-store shopping. No matter what your industry, a mobile optimised website is crucial. For example, 82% of consumers use a mobile to research products in store.

How to optimise your website for mobile

Deal with performance issues

A website that takes five seconds or more to load increases the probability of a user bouncing by 90%. Test the website by using it yourself and look out for issues, such as broken links, poor content or slow page loading. There are many steps you can take to improve things, for example compressing images and using caching will speed up page load. It’s also important to ensure the site is responsive and will adapt to the screen size of the device being used to view it.

Use Google’s tools

The Mobile Friendly Test Tool will analyse your website and show you how mobile friendly it is overall, as well as highlighting problems such as pages with potential issues.

Make sure you’ve got reliable hosting

This is all about finding the right hosting platform for your business in terms of speed and resources. Without this it will be almost impossible to ensure the site performs well for mobile users no matter what other steps you take.

Re-evaluate your pop ups

Pop ups can be effective and are a useful way to draw attention to a specific message. However, for mobile users they may be obstructive and interrupt the experience of your website so make sure they are easy to close and as unobtrusive as possible.

If your website is optimised for mobile users then your business has access to one of the largest groups of online browsers today – if it’s not then you are potentially closing yourself off from a huge market.#

Get in touch with Iconic Digital for all your website design needs today.