10 Must-Consider Facts While Optimizing Your Website For Mobile in 2021
Most people judge a site depending on its mobile-friendliness or responsiveness. Therefore, you’re likely to lose most of your potential customers if you don’t have a mobile-friendly website.
But is it challenging to make your website mobile-friendly? No! So, how can you optimize your website for mobile in 2021? Worry no more!
In this in-depth post, you’ll find ten crucial facts to note while optimizing your website for mobile in 2021. We’ll also let you know the definition of a mobile-friendly website and why you need one.
Let’s get started!
Definition of A Mobile-Friendly Website
Designers create a responsive website application or mobile-friendly web application to display web content on various mobile devices, such as tablets and smartphones.
You optimize your site for various mobile devices to allow mobile users to read the content and navigate the site with less hassle.
A mobile-friendly website can adapt quickly to the mobile devices’ precision and screen size used by the site users. With a mobile-friendly website, website users find the things they are after fast.
Creating a mobile-friendly website involves formatting the web application content and interface to work well on mobile phone devices. Through this, the website users will enjoy faster load times, and the text will be more comprehensive, allowing website visitors to read the content easily.
Why Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly?
To Enhance User Experience
It’s vital to make your site mobile-friendly to ensure the website visitors get an exceptional experience.
Mostly, the desktop business sites end up timing out or glitching on mobile browsers. Note that a broken/messy site may result in frustration, discouraging visitors from using your site and instead move to a different website.
State-of-art technology plays a critical role, but convenience comes with several outstanding benefits.
Expect more individuals to visit your site and even purchase your services/products if your website offers more convenience.
Besides boasting an aesthetic look and clutter-free appearance, creating a mobile-friendly site also involves expediting the website’s speed. If you have a mobile-friendly site, it means the site’s links and pages will load more effectively.
When you optimize your website for smartphones, you allow your potential audience to access the information they need with less hassle and faster.
Also, a mobile-friendly website lowers the bounce rate by ensuring visitors stay for long on your site.
Improve SEO
A mobile-friendly site also benefits SEO. When search engines, such as Google, assess your site, they check how it performs on different screen sizes and mobile devices and review its user experience.
As a result, search engines will always check how you access your potential audience via mobile devices and websites. Expect your website to rank higher on various search engines if your site observes excellent traffic.
However, focus on designing a mobile-friendly and desktop-friendly site to provide an excellent user experience and attract organic traffic.
Competitive Advantage
Customers/clients leave your site because of several reasons. The primary reasons for the customers/clients to leave include broken, messy, or slow web pages and web links.
Research shows that around 43 percent of the customers/clients cannot revisit the site because of slow loading times when using their mobile devices.
With a mobile-friendly site, you’ll captivate more customers and shine through your competitors. Expect the website clicks to increase if your site features a faster loading time and boasts an excellent user experience.
Therefore, with a mobile-friendly site, you’ll beat your competition and appear on the first pages of search engines.
10 Must-Consider Facts While Optimising Your Website For Mobile in 2021
1. Pop-Ups Interrupt the Users Browsing Experience
Pop-ups came into Google’s crosshairs in August 2016. This year (2016), Google launched a new search algorithm that penalizes websites with pop-ups because of the interrupting browsing experience they create on mobile devices.
Note that pop-ups occupy the mobile device’s entire screen, interrupting the user’s browsing experience. Always use other kinds of digital advertising instead of display advertising pop-ups.
For example, you can generate affiliate ad revenue by using in-text hyperlinks featuring affiliate referrals. Also, consider CTA buttons and CTA prompts with the page content.
With these alternatives, you make it easy to monetize your website, generate advertising revenue, and prevent Google from penalizing your site.
Note that you can still use pop-ups on PCs/desktops. But expect them to become less effective because most people use their mobile devices to do research.
2. Simple Designs will Take the Day
Ensure simplicity remains on your mind while deciding on the best website template. Mobile devices feature smaller screens, meaning they can display only fewer elements.
Not all images displayed on desktops need to appear on mobile devices’ smaller screens. Also, not all menu icons or menu items displayed on desktops’ should appear on mobile devices’ smaller screens.
A mobile-friendly site is a simple website that helps visitors locate the information they require with less hassle.
3. Mobile Menus Work Excellently on Mobile Devices
Standard website menus don’t work well on mobile devices.
Expect the mobile websites to get cluttered if you show the standard menus. Instead, focus on mobile menus because they will hide all the items and get displayed only by clicking the menu icon.
If you’re a WordPress user, you can create a mobile menu using free plugins. The Responsive Menu is an excellent example of a free plugin that will allow you to generate mobile menus within minutes.
With this free plugin, you can change colors and icons, select a template, and allocate WordPress menus with less hassle. This tool will function in your favor to create a top-notch mobile-friendly menu.
4. A Responsive Theme is the Key
Always choose a well-optimized WordPress theme if you’re a WordPress user. Also, ensure that this theme does not affect your site’s performance negatively.
Select a secure WordPress theme that gives you the settings needed for easy customization. Besides this, the best WordPress theme must feature an attractive style and look.
Choosing a responsive theme means the visitors will view your site correctly without considering the screen size, browser, and device they use.
5. A Web Host Determines How a Site Performs
Another crucial thing to note is that the web host you choose determines your site’s performance. Therefore, always take your time before choosing any web host.
Expect your site not to perform well if you go for a plan or web host that doesn’t offer the required resources and speed.
Note that speed plays a critical role when it comes to optimizing your site for mobile. Therefore, you can improve the website’s mobile friendliness by choosing the best web host or plan that keeps the site running fast.
6. Faster Loading Times Lowers The Bouncer Rate
As noted above, website speed plays a critical role in optimizing a site for mobile. As a result, you should always focus on ensuring your site offers faster loading times.
Generally, when you optimize a site for speed, you lower the bounce rate and improve the site visitors’ experiences. Therefore, speed is a pivotal factor to focus on whenever optimizing that website for mobile.
Search engines like Google also consider speed when ranking the sites. Therefore, consider improving the site speed if you want to rank higher on search engines.
7. Media Queries Keeps Heavy Loads From Mobile Sites
Media queries refer to a CSS method applied when creating a mobile-friendly website. With these queries, it becomes to change the site’s appearance on specific mobile device screen sizes.
Besides this, media queries easily hide or show some features on specific mobile device screen sizes.
8. Optimized Image Files Make A Website Usable
Optimizing the images is another excellent step to take while putting extra effort into making the site mobile-friendly. Note that one non-optimized photo can make the site unusable.
Always size images if you want to create a mobile-friendly site. Never upload photos of bigger sizes than you need. Also, consider hiding big pictures by loading smaller versions or using media queries.
Besides this, consider compressing the images to improve the site speed. Also, let lazy load images be the path to follow. Use a free plugin like Smush to display the pictures only when the site visitor scrolls to it.
Moreover, you can use tools such as Kraken to optimize the photos. This tool will make it easy to upload the images and select the best output quality.
9. Free Google Tools Help A Lot
The current market offers several search engines, but Google dominates the field. This search engine accounts for around 77% of the six billion-plus daily internet searches.
Having your site in Google is a crucial step to take as you publish your content/website online. As a result, it’s vital to maximize the free tools offered by Google.
Besides this, Google has integrated and keeps integrating useful mobile information everywhere.
For example, with keyword research, you can put extra effort into mobile keywords by changing the device type.
Google also features crucial information that explains the best way to make a site mobile-friendly.
10. Short and Concise Content is more Visible
Mobile users will find it hard to read the detailed text because of the small and narrow smartphone screens. Therefore, always focus on creating short content because it’s more visible on the mobile device screen.
With concise content, the users don’t need to scroll the text to ready everything.
Final Thoughts
Generally, it’s not a challenge to optimize your website for mobile in 2021. You only need to implement the above ten facts and prepare yourself to enjoy the outstanding benefits of optimizing your site for mobile.
Note that responsiveness or mobile-friendly will keep playing a critical role in online research. A significant percentage of people own smartphones rather than desktops, and the time they use them per day will keep increasing rapidly.
Therefore, by optimizing your website for mobile, you’ll create a reliable digital marketing foundation and boost search rankings.