How to make your website mobile friendly

Read on to discover how to update your website to make it a mobile friendly experience that will increase traffic and engagement.

Since mobile phones were brought into the digital age with the integration of apps and the internet, the need for mobile friendly websites has risen rapidly.

In fact, according to Statista 89.3% of the UK population were active mobile internet users in January 2021.

This comes to over 58 million mobile users in this country alone! So it is more important than ever that your website is optimised for mobile devices.

What is a mobile friendly website?

You may have heard of the term mobile optimised site or mobile friendly website, but these are essentially the same thing.

The term refers to a website which has been optimised to be viewed on a mobile device.

Have you ever tried to access a site which isn’t mobile friendly on your device? If you have you may have noticed the user experience can be frustrating and slow. Images often slowly crawl on to the screen, the layout often requires you to click on tiny icons at the top of the screen and the page doesn’t fit properly on your mobile.

A mobile friendly site fixes all these issues and ensures that the user experience is just as smooth wherever you access it from.

There are several ways of achieving a mobile friendly site, these are:

  • Responsive design – This means that you website adapts to the screen size to the device being used.
  • Dynamic – This is a purpose-built platform that has been built based upon the device the user is viewing your site from
  • Mobile app – This is a great alternative from your traditional mobile friendly website. However, you may still want to adjust your existing site settings to optimise it for mobile, for the users not wishing to download your app.

How do I make a website mobile friendly?

There are a lot of factors to consider to transform your website into a mobile friendly site. Here are the a few of them to get you started:

Optimise your images

If you keep your website image-heavy the loading times for your mobile site will be considerably longer, which is likely to deter some potential consumers. In fact, 39% of users will stop engaging with a website if it takes too long to load, which means reduced traffic and potentially a loss of income.

To prevent this, ensure you compress your images before they are uploaded. The more compressed they are the quicker they will load up, even on a mobile.

Don’t upload your videos directly to your site

Another tip to ensure you have a mobile friendly website is, if you want to add videos to your platform, host them on a third-party site such as YouTube. Once you have done this you can embed them into your pages. This means that most of the file size and “weight” is kept on that platform and not yours.

Change button size and placement

Remember, that unlike a computer where you are using a cursor and a mouse, a mobile’s cursor and mouse is a user’s finger.

So make sure the buttons are a good size and spread out. The closer the buttons are to each other, the more difficult it is for the user to click on a specific one. This applies to links as well.

Remove pop-ups

If you use pop-ups make sure these are disabled for mobile users. There are two reasons for this, firstly, the user already has a smaller screen size, so any pop-up would block their view of the content they are viewing, which is likely to reduce engagement.

Also, unlike on desktops, you can’t trigger pop-ups appear at certain moments, such as when the user is about the close the window.

Use a large, easily readable font

To transform your pages into a mobile friendly website you want to also consider the font you use. The user has a smaller screen so ensure the font is larger than usual and that you have chosen a clear font.

With these sites, fancy ‘scroll style’ fonts are not suitable as they aren’t clear enough on a mobile phone screen.

 Avoid flash

The most common use for flash is for animations within your website. However, many phones don’t support flash and aren’t compatible.

So to make a mobile friendly website avoid utilising flash to avoid complications or errors on your pages.

Test, test, test

If you are ever in doubt that you do or don’t have a mobile friendly website, the true test is simply to access your site through your mobile. Get as many users as possible to test your pages on all different phones to ensure it is fully accessible on Android and iOS alike.

If you want to go one step further, you can even make use of Google’s handy free tool to test your website. Simply input your website address and it will tell you if you have a mobile friendly website and any issues that occurred during the test.

There are many more features and factors you can change to make sure you have a mobile friendly website, but these are some of the important ones.

If you need help optimising your website for mobile users, or simply wanting to refresh your content, we can help.

With over 12 years’ worth of experience, our team are perfectly placed to assist you with all your marketing needs from SEO and copywriting to social media.

Contact us today to find out how we can help optimise your site.