The world runs on pocket-sized devices and making sure you’re utilizing mobile-friendly website design grows in importance with every passing year.
In 2015, mobile traffic to websites sat a little above 30%. One year later it jumped up to around 50% and the most recent figure is averaged at above 60%. The simple fact is: you can no longer ignore where your website traffic is coming from. If you want your website to succeed, it better be optimized for both desktop and mobile users.
If the user numbers alone don’t convince you, here’s a few of the most relevant statistics to press the importance of a mobile-friendly site:
- Apps don’t solve everything as 50% of mobile users would rather browse a website than download something to their phone.
- People spend around 5 hours a day on their mobile devices
- 80% of the top-ranked websites on Google are mobile-friendly. So, if you want to rank higher, you better make sure yours is too.
- Mobile use is also highly intentional, with 70% of searches leading to some sort of online action.
- You rarely get a second chance as 61% of users will never return to a site that isn’t mobile friendly.
Mobile-Friendly Website Design
Here are a few ways to make sure your website visitors don’t bounce (leave the site with no action taken) on mobile.
Simplify The Design and Content
The average time people spend on a web page is under one minute. You don’t have long to capture their attention and if you don’t present the information they need fast enough, they’ll be gone (likely, for good).
Designs should be clean, easy to read, and make good use of eye leads. Copy should be short and sweet. A piece of text might look good on a desktop, but be way too much for a mobile site.
Finally, remember how people are navigating. They aren’t using a mouse, free to scroll and click everywhere on the page. Most are using one hand, and they should be able to navigate the site with their thumb.
Make Sure It’s Fast
Seriously. Make. Sure. It’s. Fast.
People expect websites to load almost immediately and every second that goes by, your bounce rate goes up.
Pictures should always be compressed to a manageable size. There are plenty of free tools that can do this for you, but the easiest way is to just convert images to .JPEG, which makes your image smaller without compromising image quality.
When it comes to videos, always take advantage of embedding. Hosting a video directly on your website will slow it down, so it’s better to upload it somewhere like YouTube and just embed it into your website.
Coding is definitely a trickier subject and unless you’re a developer, you probably just want to stay away from it. However, one simple coding note is to avoid Flash as it is generally not supported on mobile.
Location, Location, Location
As we mentioned above, mobile traffic is heavily intent-focused. People are browsing for a specific reason and 76% of users who search for something nearby, end off visiting a related business within the day.
This means that if you can include geolocation tools on your website, you definitely should. This also helps when it comes to any forms your site might have too. The shorter forms are, the better, so if you can pull a location from their device they’re much more likely to complete the shorter form.