Mobile usage has been on the rise for several years now. So, it’s only natural that mobile traffic has become increasingly important for every website. However, many sites still don’t have proper mobile optimization.
Hence, when users access them through their phone, they get super hard navigation and an overall frustrating experience. This, my friends, is how you lose users. Here are some important stats you should know about mobile usage today.
So with that in mind, you now know you need your site to be completely optimized for a smaller screen. But how? Tick off these checklist items during your mobile site optimization.
1. Integrate Accelerated Mobile Pages
Creating Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is the first thing you need to check off. These are mobile-friendly versions of your current site pages. Google launched the AMP initiative a few years ago and it’s steadily become more integrated into their services ever since.
This integration’s technical but necessary for your site’s future performance. And if your site’s on WordPress, you even get plugins that smoothen mobile optimization of each page.
2. Make the website’s design responsive
Having a responsive website means your pages will adjust in size depending on the dimensions of the screen it’s being viewed on. This is the second most important thing to keep in mind during mobile optimization.
By integrating responsive design, you won’t just improve the user’s mobile, but you’ll also open opportunities to increase mobile traffic to your site. This, in turn, will improve your rankings in search engines. Make sure you test your site on different screen sizes too.
3. Improve your website’s loading time
Aim for a site where each page loads in 1s. People are less patient on mobile than on desktop. They’ll just bounce back to the search engine results page and you’ll lose them.
Reducing image sizes and cleaning up your code can significantly improve loading speed. Also, remember that formats like Flash perform poorly on mobile and you should avoid them altogether. You can use HTML5 instead which proved to be a better option nowadays.
4. Simplify your website’s navigation
Navigation menus that appear at the top of web pages are a fantastic way of letting your users find stuff easily. The bigger your website, the more in depth these tend to be – which is fine for desktop. However, a combo of smaller resolution and touch screen can turn a wonderfully-designed desktop menu into a mobile user’s worst nightmare.
The best thing in this scenario is changing the menu to a drop-down window, like a burger menu. Yeah, the symbol with three horizontal lines that opens the menu when clicked. This lets you hide it at first, while still allowing users to access it to navigate the site.
5. Reduce the number of pop-ups onsite
Pop-up windows can positively impact conversions on a website, email signups and more. However, as effective as they are, over 70% of users admitted to hating them, finding them annoying and distracting.
This is especially true on mobile devices because popups can obscure content. First, think about whether your popup is necessary. And second, make sure it has clear call-to-actions, a visible way of closing, and isn’t obstructing anything. So you can take your mobile optimization further.
These are but a few things that you should add to your checklist to start with. Before heading into some deeper mobile site optimization practices. Want to take a page out of our book and see how we’ve made it cool to manage Plesk on the go? Check out Plesk Mobile for iOS and Plesk Mobile for Android.