Approximately 5.1 billion people owned a smart phone in early 2012. 4.2 billion human beings own a toothbrush.
In the technology era we live in, people have smartphones, tablets, laptops and e-readers so they can stay plugged in constantly. Nowadays, many of our possessions such as cars, gaming systems, and TVs can access the Internet.
Many restaurants offer complimentary wireless in their dining areas. It seems that our need to be online all the time has become more important than our other needs – even our need for personal hygiene.
While most people would find the subject gross, from a marketing perspective it is fascinating.
Smartphones and tablets have given us the opportunity to shop from the comfort of our own homes. In-store shopping is becoming less popular as people are choosing to shop on their phones instead.
Marketers now have a new way to reach their customers through these devices. Since your customers are increasingly using mobile devices to shop, you need to make sure that their mobile experience with your store is as compelling as possible.
Mobile Trends
There is a lot of great research available on mobile data and online consumer behavior. The following information will help you make better-informed decisions to help shape your mobile strategy.
According to the PewResearch Internet Project, as of January 2014:
- 91% of American adults have a cell phone.
- 55% of American adults have a smart phone.
- 32% of American adults own an e-reader.
- 42% of American adults own a tablet.
- 44% of cell owners sleep with their phones next to their bed
It seems like people NEED their smartphones. 29% of cell phone owners say they cannot imagine living without their phone.
People who own phones typically use them to go online, make phone calls, send texts, check their email, and get apps. And, increasingly to shop.
Mobile devices are clearly important to your customers. People find, review, and purchase from mobile every day. In other words, you can’t afford to ignore mobile users when planning your marketing strategy.
Tips To Optimize Your Mobile Site
Mobile devices need to have a great user experience to be successful.
The most important thing is to remember that mobile sites are for mobile users. People who are on the move are looking for a different experience than what a standard website can provide.
Mobile visitors typically want to be able to find key information without having to search too hard. This information might include store directions, a clickable phone number, or store hours by day.
They are not interested in staff bios, mission statements, or news stories.
When creating a mobile website, it is important to keep the user in mind and design it in a way that will maximize conversions. Some best practices for mobile website design include using a simple layout, large buttons, and easy to navigate menus.
1. Over – Simplify
According to Jeff Haden, a business writer, the first step to creating a mobile-friendly website is to determine what content will be on the site.
Most people won’t keep looking on their phone for more than a few minutes. If your website does not have the specific information that a customer is looking for, they will leave and go to another website.
It is important to decide what information your visitors will be looking for when they are restricted to a small screen size. This information is known as your “critical needs” and your homepage should only display the most necessary content.
2. Plan Your Site Layout
You need to determine the best way to structure your content once you know what it is. Unfortunately, this can be a huge task to shoulder. Tablets and smartphones require separate design considerations, as they come in a variety of different screen sizes and resolutions.
Therefore, responsive web design could be the best solution. Design a site layout that is flexible enough to fit any possible screen instead of creating one simple mobile template.
If a user has a large screen, the layout will respond by displaying more content. If a user has a small screen, the layout will respond by displaying less content. A responsive layout will break down and recreate itself to meet the screen requirements.
Creating a uniform experience across different browsers and screen sizes is an excellent technique for usability.
Make sure to take loading time into account when designing your responsive website. Keep in mind that mobile web pages take longer to load than desktop web pages, so you’ll want fewer pages with low bandwidth content.
Users expect to find the information they are looking for quickly and easily on a mobile site. If the site is not organized well, they will become frustrated and leave.
3. Incorporate Branding Elements
According to Mobile Marketer, branding can be effectively extended to mobile platforms.
You’ll want to use the same branding elements on your mobile site as your traditional site, even though it will be simpler. According to Social Media Examiner, this is important for two reasons:
- A mobile site is a brand touchpoint where customers interact with you, and like any other touchpoint, it should reflect and promote your brand’s essence.
- Incorporating a similar design on your mobile site will make users who are already familiar with your company feel like they’re visiting an old friend, which is an important consideration for your most loyal customers.
4. Utilize Your White Space
Including a lot of information on your website is understandable. You should resist the temptation to do this, especially with your mobile site.
Blue Fountain Media believes that a lack of white space is one of the primary reasons why mobile websites can fail. Many designers mistakenly try to give mobile users the same functionality and design experience as they would have on a desktop site.
Mobile users want a different experience than desktop users; they want one that is convenient and fast.
If you want your design to meet certain standards, one way to do so is by using enough white space.
The space between elements is key, and, as Blue Fountain Media suggests, “knowing when to be restrained is often what separates success from failure.”
White space provides a cleaner, more sophisticated appearance. You can create a more aesthetically pleasing page by using white space rather than banners, pictures, and videos. White space is important to ensure that users can easily click on the buttons they’re aiming for so that they will convert.
5. Reduce The Need For Text Entry
Most people find it difficult to type on a small keyboard. It can be frustrating when you accidentally type the wrong letters, and you don’t want people to think of your brand as being annoying.
There are a few ways to get around the issue of text, according to CMS Wire. When it is possible, replace text entry fields with dropdown menus or pre-populated fields to enter information. This will help to eliminate errors and improve the overall experience for the user.
Users could be given the option to reuse stored details or enter a PIN for purchases instead of using a password.
QR codes can be used to minimize text entry, and users can be allowed to make calls immediately when they click on a phone number.
There are various ways to make it easier to type text into a smart phone.
6. Test Your Site Using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Tool
It would be a good idea to see how mobile-friendly your site is before taking any further action. This will help you to focus on the specific areas of your site that need work and give you useful information on how to make improvements.
A way to test your website’s responsiveness is to use it on several different devices. Visit the site on your own phone or tablet to see how it appears and functions.
Before you launch your website on a mobile platform, it is recommended that you test it out on a smaller screen. This lets you get an idea of the loading times, design, readability of the content, and ease of navigation.
After you finish that, you can use a specialized testing tool to get even more information. If you’re worried about whether or not your website is up to Google’s standards for mobile pages, don’t worry! Google has created a free tool that you can use to check. Appropriately, this is called the Mobile-Friendly Test tool.
Even if your site gets an overall positive result, it might still have difficulty loading certain individual items or assets. If you see a Page loading issues notification, that means there is a problem with the website. Clicking on that notification will show you a list of what assets the testing tool couldn’t load on mobile.
Now that you have a list of issues, you can deal with each one individually. One way you could improve your website’s relationship with Google is by editing your robots.txt file to allow access to blocked files. Another way would be to fix any redirection errors.
7. Use Custom CSS To Make Your Website Responsive
A lot of responsive web design involves using CSS. A small amount of CSS knowledge can go a long way in making your site mobile-friendly.
An example of something you can do with CSS is using media query ranges.
You can use media queries to tell browsers to load different layouts for a page depending on the size of the screen they’re using. Media queries are an essential component of HTML, CSS, and JS libraries such as Bootstrap:
Other ways that you can use CSS to make your website more responsive include:
- Creating a CSS grid layout. CSS grid layouts, such as the one that Bootstrap provides, offer a simple way to help you adjust designs to various screen sizes. Having a layout with well-defined elements can enable you to configure how they appear and how much space they take with each size of screen.
- Using size percentages for layout elements. As you might know, CSS enables you to set the height and width of elements using pixels and other units of measurement. To make your website more responsive, we recommend that you use percentages. That way, elements such as buttons should adapt seamlessly as screens get smaller.
- Adjusting font sizes using media queries. Images and other visual elements on a page shouldn’t be the only things that scale for smaller screens. Text also needs to be responsive or you can end up with a mobile site where users can only see a word or two on their screen before needing to scroll down.
- Controlling the spacing between elements. CSS enables you to determine the spacing between elements so there’s enough whitespace even when pages scale down.
If you feel comfortable using HTML and CSS, designing a fully responsive website can be easier than you think. However, if you use a Content Management System (CMS) such as WordPress the whole process becomes much simpler since you seldom need to deal with code, even when working on a responsive design.
8. Choose Responsive Themes And Plugins
One advantage of using WordPress is that you can easily create a responsive website. Nowadays, it is more difficult to make a website that is not responsive. As long as you carefully select which plugins and themes to use, your site should function properly.
Most popular themes are developed so that they will work well on mobile devices. Simply selecting the appropriate theme can save you a lot of time. You can avoid configuring media breakpoints and creating CSS grids manually by doing it this way.
If you want to see how a theme works on a mobile device before installing it, check out its demo.
A lot of theme demos will include previews of how their designs look on mobile devices. A staging website is a great way to test new themes and see how mobile-friendly they are.
preview how a design looks across multiple devices at any time.
If you’re proactive about previewing designs, there’s very little reason why any of your pages should come out of the oven not being perfectly mobile-friendly:
It is more difficult to create responsive pages using the Classic Editor since it is not as visual as the Block Editor. You can always preview how pages look.
If you’re struggling to create responsive pages, we recommend trying a different page builder and changing themes. New plugins and themes can change how your pages look, so spend some time getting to know how they work before using them.
9. Test Your Website’s Core Web Vitals
The recent update to Google’s search algorithms includes Core Web Vitals. The vitals metrics give insights into the user experience. There are three Core Web Vitals, which are:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). This metric measures how long it takes for the largest element on a page to load. A low LCP score means that the page loads quickly overall.
- First Input Delay (FID). The goal of this metric is to measure interactivity. The FID score tells you how long it takes before a user can interact with a page as it loads.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). This tells you how much the layout of a page ‘shifts’ or moves around as it loads. You want to aim for a CLS score of near zero to minimize that movement.
Putting a score on a website’s user experience is tough. Therefore, Core Web Vitals don’t paint an entire picture of the overall user experience of a site. However, they enable you to measure key technical aspects of any page that have a direct impact on how enjoyable they are for users.
Conclusion
Although mobile shopping is a new phenomenon, it appears that it is here to stay. People are increasingly choosing to shop from home instead of going to stores. This is because it is more convenient.
Even though people are shopping in stores, they are using their phones to look up customer reviews, product ratings, price matches, and other important information that helps them make purchasing decisions.
Nowadays, it is necessary to have a mobile-friendly website because people are always using their phones. If you do not design your website to be mobile-friendly, you run the risk of losing customers.
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