Did you know that:
- 68% of mobile users are more likely to remain engaged on a mobile-responsive website
- 62% of top-ranking websites are optimized for mobile searches
- Websites that aren’t optimized for mobile searches experience a bounce rate of 60%
- Most online shoppers (72%) prefer mobile-friendly websites when making purchases
These statistics echo the need to optimize your website for mobile searches. With smartphones being the primary devices most people use to shop online and browse the internet, more businesses have yet to develop mobile-friendly websites.
But how do you make a website mobile-friendly? Do you design another website from scratch, or can you tailor an existing website to become mobile-responsive?
Here are tips to help you navigate the process.
What is a Mobile-friendly Website Design?
This is the process of designing websites for mobile devices like tablets and smartphones. These sites have a simple design and layout, making navigation on smaller screens easy.
There are two ways of developing mobile-friendly website designs:
- Developing a separate website for mobile devices
- Creating a responsive design of the original website. This approach ensures your website adapts to the screen size it’s viewed from.
Why a Mobile-friendly Website Design?
A mobile-friendly website helps you reach more customers than a regular website. With over 6.8 billion smartphone users globally, more website traffic is likely to come from mobile devices.
Thus, having a mobile-friendly website is a surefire way of reaching more people. Also, mobile-friendly website designs offer a better experience as they’re easier to navigate on smaller screens.
Let’s face it: when you’ve a mobile phone in hand, you’re more inclined to use it to make searches than a laptop.
Mobile-friendly websites get preferential treatment when ranking them on search engines. Search engines like Google use mobile SEO to rank websites; thus, mobile-friendly websites are likely to rank higher.
Tips for Mobile-friendly Website Design
So, how can you develop a mobile-friendly website design?
Have a Responsive Layout
A responsive website adapts to different screen sizes. This means the content, images, and other elements change to fit the respective device.
For example, a web page renders a two-column layout on a desktop, but when it’s viewed from a mobile device, it renders a one-column design.
Note that a responsive layout doesn’t affect the site’s aspects, like the load time, image, or text size. The design is tailored to adjust to the respective device.
Collapse Extra Content
The vast screen spaces on desktops make it easy to add as much content as possible, but this is not the case with mobile devices.
The limited screen space requires designers to prioritize the most critical content and shorten or avoid displaying non-essential content.
That’s where collapsible and expandable menu options come in handy. Adding this feature to a mobile design lets users view the necessary content.
You could add a plus sign that reveals hidden content or an icon that makes explanatory information optional.
Increase the Load Speed
A site’s load speed profoundly affects ranking, bounce rate, and engagement. Typically, users expect websites to load faster on mobile devices than desktops, i.e., within two seconds.
Thus, you want to optimize web design elements to ensure the website loads quickly. It could mean minimizing HTTP requests, using a content delivery network (CDN), or activating browser caching.
It would also help to optimize videos for mobile web design. You could host them on a third-party website and embed them on your website so the video doesn’t affect your site’s load speed.
Remove the Pop-ups
You should avoid using them in your mobile web design because they are difficult to close on mobile devices.
If you must add them, ensure they’re easy to dismiss or add them to desktop versions only. Pop-ups often cover the entire screen, which can frustrate mobile users.
Optimize Images for Mobile Designs
Images can affect a site’s loading speed, hence the need to compress them for mobile web design.
Compressing them reduces the required data for viewing, which helps web pages load faster. Tools that help minimize file sizes without compromising on quality come in handy.
Alternatively, image formats like JPEG XR, WebP, and JPEG 2000 can be used, which results in smaller file sizes than the regular PNG and JPEG formats.
Some designers opt for lazy loading, which ensures images load when needed. This means the image loads only when the user scrolls down or hovers.
Leverage Portrait Orientation
While mobile web designs can use a landscape orientation, the portrait mode is much more popular.
Its narrow design makes it easy to view single-column layouts, and small elements like photos and icons can be presented in a grid.
A portrait orientation also makes it easy to spread content for easy navigation and scrolling.
Social media platforms have conditioned users to spend hours scrolling on screens, and a portrait mode encourages this habit. It also enhances user engagement while keeping the content neat and readable.
Optimize the Menu for Mobile Viewing
A desktop’s vast screen space makes adding multiple menus, a navigation bar, and submenus easy. This isn’t possible on mobile web designs.
As such, web designers have used smaller hamburger menus to solve the problem. The menu consists of three parallel horizontal lines that reveal the menu when a user clicks or taps on the icon. Their size saves valuable screen space on a mobile device.
Conclusion
Designing mobile-friendly web designs can’t be overstated in an era when there are nearly 7 billion mobile users and a majority perform mobile searches. The seven tips can help you tailor your existing website for mobile or develop an exclusive mobile website. If the former, creating a website with a responsive layout helps you to tap into the mobile market. However, you want to check features like load speed, pop-ups, and content organization, which could affect the user’s experience on a mobile website. Working with a professional web design expert like Simpaul Designs helps address all such concerns. Get in touch with us if you are embarking on this journey.
