8 Tips for Optimizing for Mobile

What’s the end-goal of any website? To provide a stellar user experience for each site visitor, no matter what device he or she is accessing your site from. Optimizing for desktop is no big deal, and even tablets are fairly user-friendly, no matter the website. On mobile, however, the name of the game changes. The screen is just so much smaller than desktop and tablet screens, so it’s a different challenge to provide a stellar user experience for mobile users. It’s a challenge that’s worth your time, though. And because it’s such a worthy challenge, here’s 8 tips for optimizing for mobile to help you make your company’s website a mobile-friendly experience for all site visitors. 

8 Tips for Optimizing for Mobile

1. Work with a designer

Because, at the end of this whole process, you want a site that’s not only mobile-friendly, but also pretty to look at. And, hey! We’re designers. In case, you know, you’re looking for one.

2. Make smart font choices

Your designer will help you out on this, but just so you have a high-level understanding, here’s what you’re looking for in fonts:

a) The font needs to be large enough so people can read it without squinting or pinching. (Google recommends 12 pixels as a minimum font size.)

b) The font style needs to be clean, i.e. not overly decorative or cluttered. Because, just like with point a) – you want people to be able to read it, and to read it easily.

3. Use easily touchable navigation

If your buttons are impossible to touch, people will give up on trying to touch them. Leave plenty of space around buttons. Make buttons big and easily recognizable as buttons. Tell your audience where clicking the button will lead them.

4. Don’t hide your code

Google’s web-crawling bots – Googlebot and Googlebot Mobile – will need access to your site’s image files, CSS, and Javascript before they can render, index and rank your site’s content.

5. Keep images at the proper size

Super big images can slow down the load speed of your mobile site, since the mobile device will still need to scale down those large images to fit the screen size. And the problem with a slower load speed is that it effects your rankings on search engines like Google.

6. Make sure all content loads (especially videos)

Unplayable content is frustrating to site visitors, so check and double check that all of your content performs on mobile.

7. Keep forms short

Be honest – would you fill out a long form on a mobile site? Don’t make your site visitors do it, either. Keep forms to 2 or 3 fields at max.

8. Ask Google to re-crawl your site

Now that your site is mobile-friendly, you want Google to re-crawl your site as soon as possible. Either use the “Fetch as Google” tool or submit a site map (which is a better option if your site has many URLS that need to be re-crawled). Learn more about site maps here.

Do these 8 tips seem like a bit much? Don’t worry – we can help you through them. Click below to get started.