Providing a pleasant experience for visitors to your website takes more than just using network monitoring software to confirm traffic is uninhibited. Most people now access the Internet through mobile devices so making sure your website is mobile-friendly is vital. A mobile-ready website will ensure a better user experience which in turn means higher conversions and ultimately increased sales.
While some website-building platforms such as WordPress can automatically generate a fairly functional mobile version of your site, you are likely to achieve a higher quality mobile-friendly website if you understand the specific nuts and bolts you need to tweak to make the site work on mobile. Here’s how.
Simplify Menus
Mobile screens are much smaller than desktop and laptop displays. You have to take this into consideration when designing your website’s menus. The desktop version can have numerous and lengthy drop down menus. That won’t be feasible on a mobile display.
You can either remove some of the non-essential menu options when you are creating the mobile version or you can rearrange the menus in a format that makes it easier to navigate. Everything should fit neatly on the screen.
Keep Forms Short
Your website probably has an email subscription form, a new user registration form and a contact form. Forms are supposed to be a means of collecting information from your site’s visitors and users. Having long and complicated forms is never a good idea but it’s especially unwise on the mobile-version of a website.
Keep your forms only as long as they need to be. Evaluate each form field and ask yourself whether it’s really necessary. For instance, if you are asking visitors to subscribe to your email newsletter, their name and email address is all you need. Phone numbers and home addresses aren’t necessary. Shorter forms are easier to redesign for mobile adaptation.
Prominently Display CTAs
If you are selling a product or service, your whole point of building a website is to increase your conversions and therefore grow your revenue. You therefore have to be sure that the call-to-action (CTA) on each page is just as prominent on the mobile version as it is on the desktop one.
Since your mobile screen is much smaller, one thing you must avoid doing is squeezing multiple CTAs on one screen. Instead, think about the principal objective of each page. Is it to sell a product? Is it to get new subscribers? Is it to encourage downloads? Is it to increase social media followers? Once you determine this principal goal, make sure that’s the only CTA on the page.
Embed a Search Function
One way you can compensate for having minimal menu options on your mobile website is to incorporate a search bar. That way, if a user cannot find an item or page on your mobile site, all they need to do is search for it. You could prompt visitors with a message just above the search bar (for example, ‘Can’t see what you are looking for? Search here’).
Think about it — Amazon sells more than 10 million products. It would be impossible to have each of these items just one click away from the point at which the user lands on the site. The search bar allows customers to quickly find the product they want.
Size Matters
Navigating a website on your laptop or desktop is fairly easy. You can scroll and click on items with little difficulty. It’s a whole different ball game on mobile devices. The screen is small so if you don’t optimize the website for mobile, users would have to constantly zoom in and zoom out if they want to accurately click on a link or button.
Ergo, when creating elements for your mobile site, make sure they are large enough to tap with a finger. Leave sufficient space between the buttons to ensure users don’t click the wrong one accidentally.
Follow these tips to ensure your website is just as easy to navigate on mobile as it is on a desktop.
