7 Easy Ways to Make Your Website Mobile-friendly
In case you hadn’t heard, it’s never been more important to make sure your website is built for mobile first. Google is now prioritising mobile-friendly sites for indexing, which means not having your own web design up to scratch your seriously affect your Google ranking.
We’ve even put together a handy checklist to help you audit your website to be totally mobile-friendly, which you can find at the end of this blog post.
To make sure you don’t slip through the cracks, utilise these handy tricks to get your site’s mobile game on point.
1. Use the Right Theme
Using a theme rather than a custom website design? Check that the one you’re using is super responsive and optimised for mobile. The right theme will be “responsive”— that means it will adapt to the size of the screen it’s displayed on. No need to create an extra site for mobile!
2. Make Sure Your Font Is Legible
No one likes having to do the pinch-and-zoom when browsing on mobile. No matter how good your eyesight is, squinting at teeny-tiny font is an immediate turn-off for mobile users. Check your font size — including all headers — to make sure all text displays well on mobile.
3. Watch Your Screen Width
While the right theme will adjust the size of everything to be suitable for a smaller screen, you still need to consider how everything will display at a smaller size. It might be good to switch to portrait rather than landscape images for your website, as these display much better on mobile. And it goes without saying that enormous unscalable elements are a big no-no. When it comes to mobile, think vertical, not horizontal!
4. Check All Plugins for Compatibility
Not all plugins will be compatible with mobile browsing, which means that feature you thought made your site look amazing on a computer makes it look broken and half-completed on mobile. You’ll also want to consider how a plugin displays on a smaller screen— for example, are those dropdown menus too long for a small phone screen? Do interstitials (full-page pop-ups) provide a negative user experience on mobile?
5. Switch to HTML5
No matter how much of a whiz your developer is, your Flash-based website is not going to display on most phones— that is, iPhones. To avoid this, make the switch to HTML5. That way your site will be visible to all phones.
6. Make Sure Your Content Is Consistent
If you have a separate page for mobile (rather than a website that is optimised for mobile), then it’s important that the same content is displayed across both sites for the sake of Google indexing. This includes images and videos.
7. Ask an Expert (Reference Tech Jargon)
Indexing? Canonical AMP? Interstitials? What?! Web design and optimisation can be so confusing. What’s worse, you can easily make mistakes if you don’t know what you’re doing— putting your site’s Google rankings in jeopardy and potentially costing your business money.
Some things are best left to the experts, and web design is definitely one of them. Better yet, a web designer will create your website to adapt to mobile viewing and look just as great on any screen size.
We’ve got a whole team of experts dedicated to making websites run as fast and smooth as possible across any device. Get in touch today and see how we can get your mobile website up to speed.