Mobile Users Continue to Rise
The amount of people who use mobile devices to browse the internet has been steadily increasing over the last few years. In 2018, over 52% of online traffic came from users on mobile devices, according to Statista. Since the amount of mobile users is going up, the importance of mobile-friendly design is becoming increasingly important.
Take some time to read about why designing websites for mobile is becoming a necessity, and see what steps you can take to make your website mobile-friendly.
Why Mobile-Friendly Design is Needed
The main reason why mobile-friendly design is necessary is because of the convenience of browsing the internet on mobile devices. People can take phones and tablets anywhere they want, so they can browse the internet from any location that has good service. To give an example, if someone sees an interesting product in a store, that person can search online to learn more about it. Since this is such a convenient process, more people adopt this habit each year.
Adding to this, in 2015 a change in Google’s algorithm took place, and the search engine now prioritizes websites that are designed with mobile users in mind. As a result, many websites could rank significantly worse if they are poorly optimized for mobile devices. Designing your website to be mobile-friendly is the key to increasing your online visibility.
Following this change, updating your website with mobile in mind can help you reduce bounce rates and improve your website’s search rank. With the proper setup in place, a mobile-friendly site can net you a lot more conversions. Since the amount of mobile users slowly increasing each year, designing your website to be optimized for mobile is almost a necessity in the online space.
What Works on Desktop Might Not Work on Mobile
Another important thing to keep in mind is that not everything that works on a desktop will translate perfectly to mobile. A page with many large images may run smoothly on a computer, but on a mobile device those images may take much longer to load. Mobile users do not always have a lot of time, so if the site takes too long to load they will probably sign off, and you will miss a conversion.
In addition, since people can visit your website from any location, it should look presentable on any device. Say someone visits your website on a computer and walks away impressed; that person may text the link to your website to a colleague. This new person could visit your website right on the phone, and if the site is not optimized for mobile things could go sour quickly, and you could lose a potential client.
You also have to keep in mind the difference in screen sizes for a computer monitor and a phone screen. Since the phone has a smaller screen, some text and images may be harder to see. If users have a hard time reading your content they will be tempted to walk away as soon as possible.
Tips for Designing a Mobile-Friendly Site
If you need help optimizing your website, here are a few simple things you can do. To start, you should consider using larger font sizes for content pages. Smaller words can be hard to read on smaller screens, so increasing the word size can help alleviate this problem.
Responsive design helpful tool that is frequently used to make websites more mobile-friendly. Through the use of flexible layouts and images that can be optimized for mobile and desktop, this design style lessens the amount of work for web designers. Once this design is active, the web page can detect the screen’s resolution, and can naturally adjust the page layout to fit on the proper screen.
Navigation is also an important part of mobile-friendly design. Implementing a navigation bar on the top of the website can help users find a specific page in a shorter amount of time. Do not make the navigation process convoluted, because mobile users, particularly phone users, are restricted by screen size.
Websites behave differently on different devices, so if you have friends with devices from different manufactures, ask them to test any updates to your site before they go live. Website testing is a long, but necessary process that must be done if you want to make sure everything runs smoothly.
