The majority of people are using mobile phones for everything these days, even to conduct business. This means you need to ensure that your website is optimised for mobile users – otherwise you will lose a large amount of your audience. The best way to get the most out of your mobile site is to consider the following.
Speed
You will need your mobile site to be fast, otherwise people will lose interest. In order to get the best speeds, you will need to ensure your images aren’t too big. Don’t have too much content for the site to have to load, too. This includes text; don’t go overboard. You will also need to minimise coding and reduce redirects where possible.
Simplify
Keep things simple if you can, so that the site is fast and easy to consume. The layout shouldn’t be complicated, and should fit on the screen. People don’t want to have to scroll left or right in order to read all of the text. You will want the layout to work fluidly for many sized mobile phones, so don’t design for only one size. Use compression tools in your code. Script compressors such as HTML compressor or Gzip compression will automatically get rid of unnecessary comments, white space, or code.
Avoid flash
This plug-in may not be on the user’s mobile phone and therefore it will restrict what they can see. Avoid this issue by not using flash at all where possible.
Navigation
You will need simple navigation on your mobile site, in order to provide the best user experience for visitors on mobile. This means you will need to have easy to find navigation bars, menus, links, search bars and “back to top” buttons. This will aid user experience, speed and understanding – encouraging them to stay on the website.
Think Scroll
People will be using touchscreen phones and scrolling when using your site. Think about this when designing the site, in order to get the best out of it. Don’t put buttons in the line of the scrolling, otherwise they can be accidentally clicked and cause frustration or bounce rates. Allow for “fat fingers” when scrolling, too, for some people may not be able to click small buttons or type very well with large fingers! Accommodate for them.
Titles, Content and Metas
Your titles will look poor on a small screen if they are really long. The same goes for text. If it goes on endlessly on mobile, people may not want to read it at all. Keep things short if you can, but try not to lose the information of the content in the process. This includes URLs and meta descriptions, too, in order to get the most out of your mobile site.
Don’t allow pop-ups
You should not allow pop-ups in general, and especially not for mobile. This will cause users to feel irritated and potentially exit the site. Get rid of pop-ups to ensure the site works fast, efficiently and doesn’t cause anyone to leave.
Optimising your mobile site is in your best interest, so don’t cut corners. Allow your business to succeed. Maximise your efforts by following the information above and ensuring your mobile site works wonders for your visitors. If you need any more information, or want to find a professional web designer to do it for you, get in touch with our team at SEM Consultants.