Improving your mobile CX
The number of people using mobile devices to access the web has increased drastically over the last few years. Today, mobile and tablet internet usage exceeds desktop use and accounts for over 51% of internet usage worldwide. Improving your mobile website to target this growing category of users can not only improve your conversion rates but also ensure you stay ahead in the market.
A recent Google survey found that 74% of visitors are more likely to return to mobile-friendly websites while 61% are likely to leave if a site isn’t. And if your site is slow, they may not even wait for the page to load. Actually, over 50% of mobile users will abandon a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load and 30 percent will abandon a purchase transaction if the shopping cart isn’t optimized for mobile devices.
Related: How to create a mobile landing page that converts
And with Google having recently changed its SEO algorithms to favour mobile-friendly websites, optimizing your website for mobile devices should rank high on your list of priorities.
With this in mind, we’ve created four simple tips on how to improve your mobile website:
1. Design for the device
Your website should have a simple and clear website design to help mobile device users access information on your website easily and in the shortest possible time.
Keep typography clear and concise
The screen sizes of the mobile devices are quite smaller in comparison to desktops. Keep the font size legible to avoid forcing users to zoom in on the screen. In addition, you should avoid overly large titles and keep the fonts structured and less stylised.
Reduce the use of forms
We all know how tedious form-filling can be. Well, on mobile, it can be even worse. So, if you have to include forms, make sure you include only the necessary fields. Furthermore, you should make the fields and most importantly, the submit button clearly visible to ensure the process is as easy as possible.
Highlight your calls to action
Your landing pages should have a direct route to a call-to-action (CTA) button. Ensuring your CTA stands out can greatly improve your conversion rates.
2. Optimize for search engines
Don’t presume that search engines will be able to identify your mobile website. Images, CSS and JavaScript from search engines get blocked all the time preventing crawlers from seeing them. This, in turn, can prevent your mobile site from being rendered as intended.
Google’s “Fetch as Google” enables you to check how a web page will be looking when Googlebot crawls that page. The tool can help you troubleshoot web pages and improve the performance of your website in search engine result pages.
3. Optimize your mobile pages.
Optimizing your mobile pages can result in performance improvements for your website. Reducing the virtual size of pages on mobile websites can be a great place to start. This can be achieved through the use of low-resolution images and Dynamic Serving.
Dynamic serving makes it easy to optimize your website content for each of desktop, tablet and smartphone. It enables the server to determine the device being used to access the site and sends out HTML, CSS and JavaScript and media files depending on the device. Mobile and desktop user receive different content from the same URL ensuring mobile devices don’t have receive megabytes of useless HTML-CSS code.
4. Simplify your navigation
The navigational structure of your personal website matters a lot, both on desktop and mobile. Just like speed, poor navigation can cause you to lose a large number of visitors. An ideal mobile website should offer easy and convenient navigation to its users by integrating a visible navigation bar, a search bar and other important elements of a website.
Avoid long-scroll websites on mobile devices and limit the layers of navigation. If your mobile design is too long and requiring a high number of clicks before getting to the products, users will likely lose interest and bounce to other websites.
Conclusion
Ignoring the ramifications of a poor mobile website can be a big loss to your business. Using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test, you will be able to tell whether your website is optimized for mobile. Simply input your site’s URL and the test will tell you if your site is mobile friendly as well as give you a screenshot of how the page looks on a mobile device.