How To Design & Maintain A Mobile Friendly Website

Today, all businesses are recommended to adapt their websites to the significant growth of mobile devices. Google has made an official announcement that an increasing number of searches are being facilitated on mobile devices. With Google’s constant efforts to update their mobile search algorithm, your website should always remain mobile-friendly. What’s more, other search engines such as Bing are doing the same thing. Below are some of the key attributes of a mobile friendly website you should remember to ensure the success of your own:

Start: Understand the Design Principles of Mobile Friendliness

Before you begin building your website, you should already be familiar with the target mobile user’s behavior. In most cases, their needs differ from desktop users as they want to be able to access information as easy and quickly as possible, while on the move. Check out these essential guidelines and implement them as necessary:

• Include visible contact information in the header of every page. It is the first thing you want your visitor to see
• Avoid using Flash and other software that are not compatible in mobile devices
• Links must be placed far enough apart for easy tapping
• You should define clickable spaces with buttons and underlines
• All text must be readable without needing to zoom

Development: Take Note of the Overall Load Time

When visitors come to your website, they must be able to begin interacting with the pages as soon as possible. That’s why it’s pertinent to get your webpage to load in two seconds or less. If you notice that your website is loading slower on mobile devices, possible causes include slow parse of HTML, small browser cache memory, user’s physical location, image file size, poor network connections, and more.

Factors that can be rectified on your end should be completed as soon as possible. It is true that building an attractive website is important, but it should offer a high standard experience to your visitors as well. Always remember that shorter load page times improve your search engine rankings!

Maintenance: Keep Track of Google Analytics

When you need to determine the design of your mobile website and its content, you should aim to create an experience that is similar to what your audience expects from your site. You should note that just concentrating on optimizing your site for mobile trends isn’t enough. To obtain great insights that will help you make the right tweaks, simply use Google Analytics and evaluate the following data:

• Bounce rates: Which is higher? Is it desktop browsers or mobile devices? Next, determine if load times or compatibility is causing problems
• Exit pages: Investigate which are the most popular ones and try to identify the reasons that causing visitors to bounce
• Landing pages: Get inspired from popular landing pages and make sure you design your site from your mobile user’s perspective as well
• Page visits: Identify the pages that get the most visits from mobile devices. You may need to tweak/update your images and content to enhance the page’s appeal
• Overall time on site: Which page do mobile visitors spend the most time on? Knowing this allows you to prioritize where to focus your attention

To sum it up, a fail-proof way to designing and maintaining mobile friendly websites is to make it personal and keep users engaged.