DID YOU KNOW? There are over 1.2 billion people accessing the web from their mobile devices.
With more than 15% of all internet traffic coming from mobile devices, it’s important to make sure that you aren’t alienating people with a site that isn’t mobile-friendly.
A mobile-friendly site is simply a version of your website that has smaller images, a slightly different layout, and loads much faster on a smartphone or tablet than your normal site would.
So why do you need a mobile-friendly site? Well, research shows that 57% of mobile users will abandon your site if they have to wait 3 seconds for a page to load. If you don’t have a mobile-version of your site and your content takes longer than THREE SECONDS to load, chances are you’re losing lots of potential subscribers.
In this post we’ll take a quick look at how consumers behave differently on mobile and desktop platforms, discuss a few things to look out for on your own website, and go through a couple of tips for optimizing your site for mobile.
Mobile Behavior
It’s important to recognize that they way we surf the web when using a desktop or laptop is completely different from the way we surf the web when using a smartphone or tablet.
Mobile users are often multi-tasking. They could be riding a bus, watching TV, hanging with friends, eating dinner, etc. This generally means that their attention is divided and they want to get to the information they seek faster and more efficiently.
There are 3 major objectives of mobile users:
- Seeking urgent information. This is often related to a user’s current location or activity and is mostly through search engines or recommendation sites like Yelp. A great example of this is being out on the town with your friends and craving late night munchies.
- Seeking real-time information. This could be things like looking up stock quotes, checking in on the score of a sports game, weather updates, etc.
- Seeking entertainment or distraction. These are the folks that are surfing social media, reading articles, watching videos, checking their email, shopping, etc. Basically, they are consuming all the content they can get their hands on. This is the group that content producers should be most concerned about.
Because mobile users have the attention spans of goldfish and the patience levels of dogs that haven’t eaten in three days, it’s super important that your website is optimized for mobile devices. If it’s not, chances are your visitors will click-off and visit a competitor’s site or go back to scrolling through their Facebook newsfeed and completely forget about you.
Mobile Checklist
Here are a few things you can check on your site to make sure it is optimized for mobile users.
- Does it load in three seconds or less?
- Is there a clear call to action?
- Is the content easy to read?
- Is it easy to navigate?
- Is there a fluid user experience?
Be ensuring that these 5 things are in check, you’re making your visitor’s experience infinitely better and encouraging them to stay on your site.
A well-designed mobile site guides the users seamlessly through the most salient information and presents it all in easy-to-view ways. Make sure that your text is large enough and your webpages are resized to fit appropriately on smartphone and tablet screens. There’s nothing worse than having to zoom in and out of a page on your phone and search endlessly for that one piece of information you are looking for.
Designing a Mobile Site
Ensuring that your website is mobile-friendly is easier than ever these days. Many WordPress themes come with built-in optimization features and most other CMS services also provide solutions.
If you’ve got a WordPress site, here are two lists with over 140 responsive themes:
Still shopping for a CMS? You might want to consider Squarespace or Wix. Both have very easy drag-and-drop design features and are fully optimized for web.
And for those of you a little more design/dev savvy or just wanting a custom experience, you can always design a mobile-version yourself (or hire someone to design it for you).
If you found this post interesting or have something to add, please drop it in the comments below! We always love to hear from you.
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