Have you ever accessed a website from your smartphone, but ended up leaving because the side menu was covering the entire article you were reading and there was just NO WAY to remove it?
If you have, so have we. It’s painfully annoying, especially when you’re reading something really interesting and subscribe-worthy. And if you’re the owner of that website, that’s one less impression for you, and more bounce rate.
Website design is a big make-or-break factor when it comes to making an impression towards potential clients. If potential clients can’t navigate through your website and find what they need, you can’t expect them to come back or to even sign up for your services.
Mobile Websites – Why They Matter?
Having a mobile-friendly website matters now more than ever. With almost everyone having a smartphone in their pocket, imagine the number of people potentially accessing your website from their smartphone.
And if we have to put it down in numbers, Google announced in 2015 that smartphones have overtaken desktop when it comes to searches. This means more people are using their smartphones to search for information on the fly more than they’re using desktops.
For e-commerce websites, having a mobile-friendly website is even more crucial now. People could potentially be shopping on your website through their smartphones, and if they can’t find the “buy” button, you’ll have a hard time selling your products.
Designing Your Mobile Website
Now that you have a grasp of how important it is to have a well-designed mobile-friendly website, here are some tips you can use when you decide to set-up your mobile website:
1. Minimize the use of pop-ups
Pop-ups are great advertising tools: they pop-up when someone enters your site, putting your promotional material up and centre for visitors to see. But do it too many times, and it gets extremely annoying – sometimes to the point that visitors will run out of your website like it’s infested with pests.
When you use pop-ups (especially the one that can fill up the entire smartphone screen) make sure it’s easy to dismiss. Limit pop-ups only to appear during entry to your website or after a long interval so that you don’t annoy your visitors as they navigate through your website. Also, pop-ups might affect your mobile search ranking.
2. Make navigation easy
Just like a house, viewing a website from a small screen means having little space to move around. If you want customers to stick around, you’re going to have to make it easy for smartphone visitors to navigate through your online castle.
One way to make navigation on your website easy is by making sure all your buttons are appropriately sized. This means making sure buttons are big enough to easily tap or swipe, menus and tabs are easy to understand, and visitors can easily navigate back to the homepage. If you’re an e-commerce website, navigation is even more important since there’s a lot of movement from one webpage to another.
3. “Build” your mobile website
Your mobile website isn’t just a smaller version of your desktop website; it’s not about making your website small to fit a small screen. Your mobile website must be structured specifically for mobile and tablet devices.
Change your mobile website’s format from your desktop website: simplify your menu bar, opt for a side menu instead of a top menu, and limit your files to ensure a good website load speed. Build our mobile website using the latest web development tools to make sure that it is capable of running well on any kind of handheld device.
4. Keep the search bar accessible
When visitors can’t find what they’re looking for on your website even after navigating through your website, they’ll turn to the one thing they know that can help them: the search bar.
Just like how Google has become an important part of any internet user’s life, the search bar on a website has become a go-to friend for many. So make sure you keep that little handy tool accessible to visitors because they’ll eventually look for it.
If you’re an e-commerce website, the search bar is perhaps one of the most important features your website should have. Buyers want to find what they want to buy as quickly as possible, and they won’t have time to tinker around your website just to find what they want. Also, make sure that search results are relevant to the search query unless you want to have really frustrated customers.
Design For Mobile Now
Sooner or later, mobile websites are going to be the new king of search engines. And thanks to Google’s mobile-first indexing, it won’t take long before websites with a mobile-friendly counterpart begin to dominate the first two pages of SERPs. If you’re still not creating a mobile-friendly version of your website, now is a good time to begin optimising your website to be adaptable to mobile.
Optimising websites is not an easy task and require a lot of Optimization knowledge that only a reliable team of SEO specialists have. It will save you a lot of time and headache if you get the right team to work on your website.
