Mobile-friendly? How to Make Sure Your Website is Optimized for Mobile
In previous blog posts, we’ve discussed the importance of a mobile-friendly website. One important topic remains: how do you make your site mobile-friendly? This blog post covers how to make sure your website is optimized for mobile devices.
Mobile-friendly? How to Make Sure Your Website is Optimized for Mobile
Site Testing
Page Speed
Page speed testing is your first step. Figuring out how fast your site loads on desktop and mobile will give you a place to start. Websites like this one will run diagnostics on how fast your site runs. A quick page speed translates across platforms and is a good sign about the credibility of your website. This is relates to mobile-optimization because, especially when on phones, people won’t wait a long time for a site to load. I’m guilty of this myself, if a website page is taking a long time to load, I’ll close out the tab. In order to keep traffic on your site, work on a fast loading time.
The second kind of testing that you can run is mobile testing. Websites like this one and this one will help run tests on how your site performs on mobile devices.
Manual Testing
In addition, you can manually test your site on mobile devices. You can use an iPhone, android phone, and tablet to scroll through your site. There are three main things you should look out for while looking through your mobile site. The first is checking how the layout and design looks. On differing phone screen sizes, your text and images might look funky. Make sure all your text is visible on the page and that nothing overlaps.
The second thing to test is your links. Throughout your site, the links to other pages, websites, and content need to be accurate. Click on each link/button and ensure that they all go to the correct place.
The third thing to test are the images on your site. Do a quick scan and keep an eye out for images that are squeezed or stretched out on the page. With all these things that you’re testing, make sure you/your developer corrects them for accuracy and clarity on your mobile site.
Mobile Content
All the content on your mobile site should be crawable by search engines. This means keywords, the alt text on images, and other SEO concepts are relevant to mobile searching.
In addition, voice searching is becoming more and more used (especially on mobile devices). This means that your keywords and topics should be informed by voice searching. Titles, keywords, and meta descriptions can be closer to a conversationalist tone in order to turn up with voice searches. They should also be shorter, as there is generally less visual space on a mobile device.
Responsive Design
Responsive design is key for both mobile and desktop website development. However, while we’re focusing on mobile optimization, there are a few things to keep in mind. Clear and simple navigation is incredibly important. We’ve all seen mobile sites that are crowded, cramped, and hard to navigate. Trying to find the menu or navigation bar on a mobile site is sometimes quite the journey. You want your users to be able to see how your site is organized and how to find their way around it easily. A clean and simple design facilitates this.
In addition, shortening the copy on your mobile site is important. As stated before, there is less space to work with on each page of a mobile site. Editing and reducing your word choices comes in handy here. Use only necessary content. When creating your mobile site you can either copy the content from your desktop site or create a whole new site. However, parallel URLs are necessary so that users can find your site on both desktop and mobile.
If you’d like to learn more about website development, contact us at RedMoxy. We’ve been successful in serving our clients to becoming impactful in their industry. Click here or call (262) 303-4238.