How to Optimize Your Website for Mobile?

With the way technology is evolving, planning ahead and future-proofing your business is the best way to sustain and prosper. Your website, which stands as the forefront of your business online and directly impacts your branding, needs to be adaptable to the current trend.

In the past few years, there has been an increase in website traffic coming from mobile devices compared to desktop, and we expect to see further increase in years to come. With the difference in screen sizes and the way users interact, what seems to be good features and layout on a desktop screen might not be as good when seen through a mobile screen. Smartphones are also coming in different sizes nowadays, so we have to optimize the resolution to ensure the website can be displayed on all devices correctly. This also further increases the need of optimizing your website for mobile users.

5 Best Ways to Optimize Your Website for Mobile

There are 5 ways you can ensure your website will provide a seamless experience on mobile devices. They are:

1. Responsive Design :  

This is what you should aim for in mobile optimization. Having a responsive design ensures your website will automatically adjust its layout and content based on the size of the screen it’s being viewed on. Elements like text, images and buttons will resize and rearrange themselves for optimal viewing on desktop and mobile devices.

This is how responsive design works on news.google.com. Notice how the layout, text sizes and header menu changes?

There are many responsive WordPress themes available,  or you can work with a developer to create a custom solution.

2. Mobile-first approach : 

Similar to responsive design, a mobile-first approach is a technique implemented on the design phase of the website. The difference is, a mobile-first approach is where you design your site foundation to be used on mobile, and upscaling it to be viewed on desktop using responsive design. This ensures your website is able to be used optimally on mobile devices.

3. Prioritize Speed

A slow loading website would have a higher probability of people leaving your website if they are surfing on mobile devices. This would increase the bounce rate which would have affected a lot of aspects including your search ranking. Here are some tips to improve the speed:

1. Optimize Images : Large image sizes are usually the cause of slow loading time. Reducing the file sizes by changing into a much more modern format or optimizing it would contribute tremendously in improving your load time. There are a lot of online tools available for this, such as TinyPNG.
2. Reduce Plugins: While plugins help add functionality to your site, they might cause them to slow down. Only use plugins that are essential and always keep them updated.

You can find more tips on our blog article on 10 Proven Tips to Improve Your Website Speed .

4. Focus on User Experience ( UX )

In order to optimize your site for mobile, you would first have to focus on improving the UX for the mobile site. You can achieve this by:

1. Using large, touch-friendly elements : Buttons and elements for desktop sites might be too small to be used optimally on a mobile using touch gestures. Consider increasing the size and spacing for better user experience.
2. Simple menu : Complex dropdown menu might not be fully functional on mobile due to restricted screen sizes. Opt for the hamburger menu or simplified navigation options instead. 
3. Prioritize content : Identifying the most important information to be displayed is crucial due to limited screen size. It would also be best to avoid dumping too much information to the users to avoid them from being overwhelmed and lose focus.
4. Prioritize on User Flow : Focusing on improving user flow throughout the website is one of the most important aspects to be focused on in UX. This led users down the intended path that the users wanted to smoothly, without any hiccups.

5. Optimize WordPress for mobile 

Many of the WordPress themes available nowadays are mobile-responsive by default. However, several plugins can help further enhance your website’s functionality on mobile. Some popular options include WPtouch Mobile and AMP ( Accelerated Mobile Pages ). There are also a few plugins that help optimize the media on your site, and improve load time. You can play around to discover which best suits your site’s functionality and purpose, but the best method is to have a professional website developer help you build and optimize your website to avoid any issues in the future. If you are interested to know more, kindly contact us for more information. 

Conclusion

By following these steps, you will be able to create a mobile-friendly site that offers a positive user experience to everyone across devices. This would ultimately help boost your brand credibility and traffic to your website. To find out more on how web design would impact your branding, head on over to our blog article focusing on the topic here.