A mobile friendly website is a website that is optimized for viewing and use on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. A mobile friendly website should have a layout and design that is responsive to different screen sizes, making it easy to navigate, read and interact with on a smaller screen.
While you are designing that website, or you are contracting your website, making it mobile-friendly should be your top priority.
Over 5 billion people reported using mobile devices to access the internet globally by 2021, which represents a significant increase in mobile internet usage, as more and more people rely on their smartphones and tablets to access the web.
7 Benefits of a Mobile-Friendly Website:
Improved User Experience: By making it simple for visitors to navigate and access the content on your site, even on a small screen, a mobile friendly website offers an improved user experience.
Better Search Engine Results: Having a mobile friendly website can help increase your rankings and visibility because Google and other search engines favor them in their search results.
Improved Traffic: A mobile friendly website can help you reach a wider audience and boost your traffic since a sizable portion of internet traffic now originates from mobile devices.
Good Conversion Rates: Because mobile users are more likely to become customers, having a mobile friendly website can increase your conversion rates and sales.
Improved Social Sharing: A website that is mobile-friendly makes it simple for users to share your content on social media, which can help you gain more exposure.
Enhanced User Experience: A mobile-friendly website contributes to the development of a positive user experience, which can enhance customer loyalty and encourage return visits to your website.
Better Discoverability: By making your website mobile friendly, you can make your content accessible to a wider audience of users, including people with disabilities who might not be able to access a traditional desktop site.
Increased Local Search: A mobile-friendly website can help you appear more prominently in local search results, which will make it simpler for local mobile users to find your company.
Better Speed of Loading: A mobile friendly website is designed to load quickly on mobile devices, which can enhance user experience and lower bounce rates. Mobile users may become dissatisfied with a slow-loading website and leave it, which could harm your search engine rankings. Fast loading times on a mobile friendly website make it simpler for mobile users to access and interact with your content.
6 Steps to Make your Website Mobile friendly:
- Use a responsive design for your website: A responsive design enables your website to adapt its layout and content to the user’s screen size. Flexible grid systems and CSS media queries can be used to accomplish this. Use themes and templates that support responsive designs. One popular plugin that makes it possible is Elementor. The elementor website builder is one of the most popular plugins for website design.
- Optimize Your Images: Large, improperly optimized images can cause your website to load slowly on mobile devices. Make sure your images are web-optimized and use image compression tools.
Here are 5 plugins to help you optimize your images.
Smush: Smush is a popular image optimization plugin that can automatically optimize your images as you upload them to your website, reducing their file size without sacrificing quality.
ShortPixel: ShortPixel is another image optimization plugin that can reduce the file size of your images, making your website load faster on mobile devices.
Imagify: Imagify is an image optimization plugin that provides three levels of optimization, allowing you to choose the balance between file size and image quality.
Kraken.io: Kraken.io is a cloud-based image optimization service that can optimize your images on the fly, reducing their file size and improving your website’s performance on mobile devices.
EWWW Image Optimizer: EWWW Image Optimizer is a plugin that can optimize your images both as you upload them and in bulk, providing a simple way to improve your website’s performance.
- Use a mobile friendly content management system (CMS): Building and maintaining a mobile friendly website can be made simpler by using a mobile friendly CMS like WordPress, there are hundreds of thousands of tools that will help you to achieve this.
WordPress is a crucial content management system (CMS) due to its flexibility and ease of use. Without the need for extensive coding knowledge, even non-technical users can easily create and manage a website thanks to its user-friendly interface. Additionally, WordPress has a sizable repository of plugins and themes that you can use to enhance the features and functionality of your website and alter its appearance to better suit your needs.
The SEO-friendly design of WordPress makes it simple to optimize your website for search engines. Additionally, it has a selection of SEO plugins that you can use to increase the visibility of your website in search results, making it simpler for your target audience to find you online. Additionally, security updates for WordPress are released frequently.
- Simplify Website Navigation: To make it simpler for mobile users to find what they’re looking for, simplify your navigation menu. To keep the navigation simple, think about using a hamburger menu.
One way to use this is to keep the menu simple: Make your content easy to navigate by clearly defining categories in your headings and subheadings. Keep the number of menu items to a minimum because giving customers too many choices can be confusing for them.
To prevent the main menu from becoming cluttered, use drop-down menus for subcategories and supplementary pages.
Make sure the menu is visible and simple to access from all of your website’s pages by positioning it in a prominent area, such as the header or footer.
- Reduce Load Time: To speed up page loads, reduce the amount of content and code on your page. This may entail using tools for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript minimization, image compression, and content delivery networks (CDN).
I have listed and explained 5 Plugins to help you reduce website load speed.
- WP Fastest Cache: WP Fastest Cache is a caching plugin that can improve your website’s speed by creating a cache of your pages and posts, reducing the time it takes for them to load.
- W3 Total Cache: W3 Total Cache is a comprehensive caching plugin that can improve your website’s performance by optimizing your website’s HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files, reducing the amount of data that needs to be loaded.
- Autoptimize: Autoptimize is a plugin that can optimize your website’s code, minifying HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files to reduce the size of your page and improve its load time.
- Cloudflare: Cloudflare is a content delivery network (CDN) that can speed up your website by caching its content on servers around the world, reducing the time it takes for your website to load.
- Lazy Load: Lazy Load is a plugin that can improve your website’s load time by loading images only when they are visible on the screen, reducing the amount of data that needs to be loaded.
- Make It Easy to Tap: Ensure that links and buttons on mobile screens are big enough to tap with ease and that there is enough space between elements to prevent accidental taps.
- Test Your Website on Different Devices: Check that your website displays and operates properly across a range of mobile devices.
Final Thought
A mobile friendly website is a crucial part of any online strategy in today’s mobile-first world. With the increasing number of mobile users, it is essential to ensure that your website is optimized for mobile devices, providing a better user experience, improved search engine rankings, increased traffic and conversions, increased social sharing, increased customer loyalty, and better accessibility.
