We are living in a mobile world right now and everyone around us knows this fact.
So, if you are planning to start a business today, you do need to take care of the users who will access your website through their smartphones. And, to be precise, the number is almost 60% of the global searches happen from smartphones.
Optimizing your website for mobile phone users will definitely get you more profit and website visitors than anything else.
And, just making your website mobile friendly is not going to work for you. What you require doing additionally is optimizing your site well enough for users to find it in the Search Engine Result Pages.
Most of the people over the Internet don’t look for results beyond the first page. And, if your website comes at the top of the SERPs, Google says, there is a chance of 33% that your website will get clicked. So, if your website isn’t appearing in the first few of the results, your ROI is definitely going to suffer as you are missing out the largest part of your target customers.
So, if you are in the list of such people who haven’t yet figured out ways to fix their website for mobile users, don’t panic as here, in this article, I have summed up the necessary ways to make your task easy.
How To Optimize Your Site for Mobile Devices
Is your site optimized for mobile devices? If not, you’re losing traffic, plain and simple. No worries, here’s how to optimize your website for mobile.
1. Speed Is the Deciding Factor
I guess you are already quite familiar with this idea.
And the reason is quite apparent as loading speed is also quite an inevitable thing for your website when it is about the desktop users.
But if you think that your website loads quite quickly on desktops and it will remain the same for the mobile phones as well, then I’m afraid you are wrong. Website pages load differently on smartphones. And, you cannot just compare it with the loading time it takes to open on desktops.
Other than that, the website’s loading speed plays a major part in generating more high-quality leads.
2. Accelerated Mobile Pages Is Your Savior
Back in 2016, AMPs or Accelerated Mobile Pages were included to Google’s mobile search algorithm.
This apparently refers to the fact that whenever a search occurs from a mobile phone, AMPs appear on the top of the list. And when the person searching on the relevant topic, clicks on it, the page opens instantaneously.
Now, you’ll be wondering about how it works. Let me tell you.
Whenever a person clicks on the AMPs, it doesn’t get loaded on Google’s server, but, what Google does is it makes use of a catched display taken from the original website.
Technically speaking, you’d require three primary components to craft Accelerated Mobile Pages, which are
- AMP HTML
- AMP JavaScript
- AMP Cache
3. Make Your Web Design Responsive Enough
Google prioritizes such websites that are responsive enough and can fit perfectly on the screens of each device.
Which means, your website needs to fit well enough on a screen that is of 5 inches to the screen that is of 10 inches. If it does perfectly, Google will surely recognize you with high enough rankings.
So, while crafting a responsive design, you need to consider all kinds of devices and their screen sizes. And, if you fail to do so, you definitely won’t rank high enough and you will lose a good amount of traffic from your website, and eventually, a good amount from your revenue.
4. Squeeze the Images Without Hampering Quality
Developers know how to make their developed pages load faster than others. If you ask them, they’d tell you that they compress their codes which makes their pages load faster.
The same can be done for the images as well.
Yes, you heard that right. Bloggers usually add a good number of images within their blogs. So, if you find that there are a good number of PNG image files in the blogs or webpages, you can just compress them up to 95% using nothing but Photoshop. And the quality will sustain.
This task might eat up a nice fraction of your time, but if you are planning for the long run, you’ll definitely see good times in the near future.
It sounds really amazing, doesn’t it?
5. Flash Should Not Be an Option
Whatever you are planning, you are doing it for practical reasons, so it is better to deal with things that can help you with practical problems.
And, TBH, flash isn’t one of those that can help you with the burden of practical problems.
Those cheesy animations might appear well on pen and paper, but in the real world, they are not effective enough.
The trend of simple designs is ruling the market; fancy animations are not going to make your work easier.
So, I’d recommend you to exclude flash completely from your mobile pages. Use it while you’ll be designing a mobile gaming app later on.
6. Check If Your Website Layout Is Mobile Friendly Enough
While crafting a website, you need to look at things as well that are not technical. And the main one among them is the design of your website.
Out of the technical aspects of your website such as the loading speed and the codes, you also need to look at the fonts and the colors of your website. You need to check if your website’s content design is capable enough of focusing on the key points of your website.
To understand if things are going fine, you can just take a reference from Neil Patel’s Crazy Egg, which provides websites with heat maps that help them understand where their website is going wrong and where things are working better than expected.
7. Utilize Open Source Tools to Enhance Your Website’s Experience
To make things work, just creating a responsive design shall not be the only way for you.
You need to make sure that your website’s design is capable enough of fitting well into the screens of each size.
Now if you wish to enhance your mobile search rankings, you can just perform a Mobile Friendly Test which you’ll get in the Google Search Console. And, the best part is, this test gets conducted by a tool so you’ll be getting the results faster than expected.
So, when you get the results if your website fails to keep up with the benchmark, work on it. Fix the issues and run the test all over again. I’m quite sure that you’ll get the best results.
8. Keep an Eye on the Way People Look for Things from Their Mobiles
This is the biggest misconception which runs among most of the website owners out there.
They think that people search in the same way in both mobile devices and desktops. But, in reality, this is completely a wrong thing to believe in.
While searching from desktops, people have enough time to type longer phrases. But while surfing through their phones, they usually type smaller texts to get the exact same results. And to match up with them, you need to optimize your website accordingly.
Google lets you use up to 78 characters to craft titles for mobile users. It is different in the case of desktop users. To be precise, it is 70. So, while optimizing your website for mobile phones you get more space to elaborate the titles so that your visitors find you out easily.
9. Keep Away from Pop-ups
Pop-ups are a big NO when it is about optimizing your website for mobile devices.
And, nowadays Google even penalizes websites if they don’t make their content easily accessible for mobile users.
And this will hamper your website rankings like nothing else if the pop-ups of your website designs irritate your website visitor.
So, it is better to get rid of such pop-ups that can cause issues with your customer’s browsing experience.
What’s Your Take?
So, I hope you can understand how important it is to optimize your website for mobile device users.
To make sure that you reach the widest range of audience through your website, your website requires to be optimized for mobile devices.
So, if you have any queries regarding this, you can just give us a call. And if you find this article helpful enough, please share your views in the comments section.
