It’s common for people to find companies first by looking up the site on their phones. This number has only risen over the years and shows no signs of going down. Here are a few mobile-friendly tips to get you started.
Design
You have 10 seconds before a user decides if they are going to stay on your site. This means you navigations has to be flawless and intuitive. There are so many fun ways to spend your time on you phone meaning users have less patients with mobile sites. Someone could message them, they can switch screens and you will never see them again. Your design has to be eye-catching, rememberable, and most of all helpful.
Call to Action
Your website is there to promote your product or service and to lead users to take action. Your mobile site should also reflect that. Your calls to action don’t change but maybe you word them differently. Instead of showing “Call us at 000-000-0000” have a “Call Us” button so they can call from the phone in the user’s hands. Google noticed that mobile-friendly sites had “visitors visited 11% more pages on their site per visit and mobile conversions grew by 51%.”
Basics
Take note of what are the most common actions on your website. Is it people signing up for your email? Do people buy products? If so make those as simple as possible to do by phone.
The Small Stuff
Try to make it easy to search on your site this is easier to do in an app but if you can make it happen it will help conversions. Same with passwords, if a user needs to log in somewhere on your site make sure the password has an option to make it visible when the user is typing. On a phone, you can expect a little more privacy than on a desktop. And because the screen is small typing in a password more than once can make someone give up fast.
Screen
Make sure your site works in landscape when the phone is on its side. This helps users and makes your product more visible. You also need to prepare for the worst case scenario when it comes to screens. It’s possible someone hasn’t updated their phone for years. They are still your customer and you have to make sure they can see your site.
Speed
Like I said you have 10 seconds before a user decides to leave. Don’t can’t waste any time with slow loading speeds. Andrew Coa wrote on how to help.
There are some easy steps to accomplish a mobile-friendly site for one spend some time on your phone. Look at competitors or people you admire and see what they are doing for their mobile sites. Be inspired and learn from their mistakes so you can avoid them. Put your site into Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. It won’t find all your design flaws from the test but it’s a good place to start and see where your site stands. Also, make sure your site has Responsive web design (RWD) it will adjust the images on your site to fit different devices without changing the URL. It will do a lot of the heavy lifting for you.
