You may be reading this using a mobile device. If you don’t like the page layout or find the content difficult to read, you can look elsewhere for the information you need. Now put yourself on the other side of the equation and imagine how many customers you could lose if your website isn’t mobile friendly.
“Optimized” means that the website will look good on smaller screens. It should open quickly and be easy to hold and connect. If you can run it on a mobile device, your site should look great on a desktop in full screen.
In this article, we’ll explain what mobile-first design is and why it’s important. First, let’s see how to approach mobile design. Here are some practical ways to optimize your site for smartphones and tablets. let’s go!
Why Mobile First Design Matters
84% of the world’s population owns a smartphone and the majority own a mobile device. This number is more than personal computer and laptop users.
In fact, many people use their smartphones as their only computer and only way to connect to the web. These are often available computers. Of course, most people carry their smartphones with them wherever they go.
No wonder mobile traffic has grown exponentially in the past few years. More than 54% of web traffic comes from mobile devices, ahead of desktop usage. This equates to 43% of desktop computers.
In practice, these numbers mean that you could be missing out on a lot of customers if your website isn’t optimized for mobile devices. With so much content, your audience (and customers) can’t afford a bad user experience. You’ll have to look elsewhere to find what you want.
What is Responsive Web Design?
Responsive design means your site fills correctly and displays information clearly, regardless of screen size. You can do this on your phone, tablet, desktop or smartwatch.
When browsing a website, make sure it fits your screen size. For larger screens, elements are grouped together so it doesn’t feel overwhelming, but it’s easier to manage.
The same is true on mobile devices. When using small screens, I want the content on the site to be small, but not too readable or navigable.
Websites that meet these standards are considered responsive. Web design and development go hand in hand here, as it is important to measure the graphic capabilities of the site. Behind the scenes are style sheets and CSS style sheets that control how your website will look on different screen sizes.
Until recently, responsive design was an afterthought. We built our website around the desktop experience. Mobile traffic now has a mobile design. This is why the term “mobile first” is often heard in web design circles.
It is important to understand that there is a difference between responsive and adaptive design. Responsive design involves creating and rendering multiple versions of a page depending on the device the visitor is using. This approach is obsolete in web design as responsiveness is a more efficient alternative.
How to think mobile first when it comes to web design
GreenPaul CEO Brian Clayton spent nine months revamping the company’s website. “We had a big problem right out of the gate,” he said. “We thought most customers would purchase lawn care services from desktop or laptop computers, but it soon became apparent that more people were accessing our website on mobile phones and tablets than desktop or laptop computers. Access from
The first complete desktop experience includes various bells and whistles such as animations. “It’s all these other features that make the desktop experience fun,” he recalls. “The problem with this approach is that the desktop experience doesn’t translate to mobile web browsers.”
As a result, websites become disorganized and unusable on mobile. Users find that they have to zoom in and out to complete the registration process.
Before redesigning the site for a mobile-first experience, the conversion rate on mobile browsers was less than 4%, he said. “This means that 96% of people who try to register will be rejected in the process.”
After redesigning their first mobile site, Clayton found that 82% of customers who started the free offer signup process completed the process on a mobile or tablet device. “Our mobile-first product is the only reason we’re competitive today,” he said.
There’s a lot to learn from GreenPaul’s experience when it comes to mobile design. Start recording your audience.
Connect with your audience and ask for customer feedback
When redesigning your website, you need to understand how your existing customers interact with each other. This means looking at analytics to see if engagement rates differ between mobile and desktop users.
Analysis shows that mobile users are spending more or less time on the site. This poor mobile user experience makes no sense. If the data points in that direction, your best bet is to ask your users what they like and dislike about your site.
When Zonda Wilson, owner of Blue Skincare in Los Angeles, started asking for customer feedback, she realized the site wasn’t mobile-friendly.
“I used to ask customers to write reviews, but they didn’t know where to write,” he recalled. “When I ask about the blogs and articles I post, they have trouble finding them. They have to narrow down…” My company information came up. They don’t know how to navigate my site..most of them get frustrated and never get past the first page.
When Wilson upgraded the site to a mobile-friendly version, he immediately noticed that users were viewing more pages on the site than usual.
There are many proven techniques for optimizing mobile websites. However, customer feedback often points to a poor user experience.
Think small (in screen size)
Modern smartphones are powerful and a significant portion of the audience has a good internet connection. However, you want your site to load quickly. Avoiding confusion is one of the best design strategies.
Vitaly Vinogradov, CEO of Modern Space Lighting, found that switching to a mobile-first design resulted in 30% more conversions than desktop. “Removing unwanted extensions, pop-ups or other screensavers on the mobile version of your site is an important task,” he said.
The team integrated it into the site and removed some social sharing flags that were taking up valuable screen real estate. When you design with large screens, you can include a lot of elements that don’t matter to the user.
“We have to design at a lower cost,” said Matt Felton, a product designer in Los Angeles. Caution is essential. Information and content should be kept to a minimum. Once your mobile site is ready, you won’t need to figure out how to add it to the desktop version of your site.
Eliminating this visual clutter not only makes your website mobile-friendly; This allows the audience to focus on what is important. This means calls to action, forms, posts and other key elements of the user journey.
Adding to the beauty of the design
“Customers today expect more sophisticated design,” Felton said. “Seeing the business case for a good, well-functioning website is a big driver,” he says. And all my competitors have beautiful, responsive websites, so no one will comment negatively on my product.”
A professional-looking website doesn’t just reflect the positive aspects of design. This shows that we have worked hard to provide the best user experience. Unless you work in a specific field, consumers always have other options online. That’s why giving the best in website design is so important.
8 Ways to Optimize Your Website for Mobile Devices
Now that we know why it’s important to make your site mobile-friendly, let’s get a little more practical. The next few sections cover the most important aspects of creating a mobile-optimized website, from the simple to the technically complex.
To improve your website’s performance on all devices (preferably Google’s mobile index), we recommend taking the time to implement these practices whenever possible. Come to work!
1. Test your site with Google’s mobile-friendly tools
We recommend testing the performance of your mobile-friendly site before taking the next step. This will give you a better idea of what specific areas of your site need work and give you valuable information on where to improve.
One way to do this is to make your website easy to use on different devices. Visit our site to see how it looks and feels using your smartphone or tablet. Doing this will give you an idea of load times, how your design behaves on smaller screens, whether or not the content is still readable, and whether or not the navigation is interesting.
Once this is done, you can go deeper with a special test tool. Fortunately, Google has created a free site that you can use to see how your site ranks on mobile pages. Namely, this mobile friendly testing tool is called:
The tool will return a positive result if the page being tested is mobile. However, if we find improvements, we will recommend possible changes to improve the mobile experience.
Even if the overall results of your site are good, some assets may have problems loading. If so, you’ll see an alert for a page loading problem. Click on this warning to see the list of assets that the test tool cannot install on your mobile.
At this point, you can solve the problems listed in order. For example, you can edit your robots.txt file to block Google from accessing files or fix redirect errors.
2. Make your website responsive with custom CSS
Most implementations of responsive web design involve the use of CSS. To make your site mobile friendly, a little knowledge of CSS would be great too.
For example, you can use CSS to implement a field called “media request”. Media queries (or responsive breaks) allow you to tell the browser when to open a different page layout based on screen size. Media query is an important component of Bootstrap like the HTML, CSS and JS libraries.
Here are some other ways to use CSS to make your website more responsive.
- Create a CSS grid layout. CSS grid layouts like Bootstrap provide an easy way to help you adapt your design to different screen sizes. A layout with well-defined elements allows you to adjust the appearance and space occupied by each screen.
- Use a size percentage for layout elements. As you know, CSS allows you to adjust the height and width of elements using pixels and other units of measurement. We recommend using percentages to make your website more responsive. Therefore, elements such as buttons should adapt easily when the screen shrinks.
- Set the font size using a media query. Images and other visuals on the page should not be oversized for small screens. The text should also be responsive. Otherwise, you may end up with a mobile site that only has one or two words on the screen before the user scrolls down.
- Control the distance between objects. CSS allows you to specify the spacing between elements, so that there is enough white space even when the page is compressed.
If you already know HTML and CSS, designing a responsive website is easier than you think. However, using a content management system (CMS) like WordPress makes the whole process easier because you don’t have to deal with code, even if you’re doing responsive design.
3. Choose a responsive theme and plugin
One of the biggest benefits of using WordPress is the ease of creating a responsive website using a CMS. In fact, it is very difficult to create an unresponsive website nowadays. As long as you choose your plugins and themes carefully, your site will be fine.
Fortunately, many popular themes are designed with mobile compatibility in mind. This means that choosing the right theme can save you a lot of time. This way you can avoid setting media break positions and creating CSS grids manually.
This is a good idea if you want to make sure your theme is responsive before installing (or purchasing). Most theme demos include a preview of how the design will look on a small screen. You can use the staging website to test new themes and see if they are compatible with mobile devices.
If you use a page builder like Block Editor or Elementor to create your page, you can always preview how the design will look on different devices. If you’re actively working on your design preview, there’s no reason to leave Owen with a page that isn’t mobile-friendly.
Traditional editors are not as visual as block editors, which makes creating responsive pages difficult. However, you can always preview how the page will look.
If you are having trouble creating responsive pages, we recommend using a different page builder and possibly changing themes. This can be a big change for any page, so you should take the time to learn how new plugins and themes work.
4. Test your website’s basic web fundamentals
Basic Web Essentials is part of the latest update to Google’s search algorithm. This is a set of “input” metrics that provide insight into the overall user experience. The web has three main components and they are:
- Large Content Color (LCP). This metric measures how long it takes to load the largest element on the page. A low LCP score usually means faster page loading.
- First Insertion Delay (FID). The purpose of this scale is to measure participation. The FID score indicates how long a page takes to load before a user interacts with the page.
- Cumulative state changes (CLS). This gives you an idea of how “progressive” the page layout is, or how forward it is when it loads. To reduce this traffic, map the CLS score to zero.
Recording the user experience of a website is difficult. Home Web Vitals therefore does not provide a complete picture of the overall user experience on the Site. Instead, you can measure the key technical aspects of each page that directly affect user engagement.
Also, Home Web Vitals is much more than a theoretical exercise. This directly affects search engine optimization (SEO) and page ranking. At Google, you can check your key web vitals with the free PageSpeed Insights tool. Enter the URL and PageSpeed Insights will show you an overview of the underlying web files.
Like the mobile testing tool, Google will suggest specific fixes to optimize your website. Home Web Vitals focuses on performance, so most of the tips you’ll see here are about improving your speed.
Note that PageSpeed provides different results for the mobile and desktop versions of your site. This means you may receive different notifications for each version. Focusing on mobile optimization tips can improve both results.
5. Improve your site’s load time
As mentioned in the previous section, website speed is especially important in the mobile world. Optimizing your site speed not only reduces it but also improves the user experience. That’s good news for your bottom line.
Testing your website’s web basics will give you an accurate idea of how long it will last. With this information and the performance improvement suggestions provided by this tool, you can improve your site iteratively. Here are some effective optimization techniques you can use on your website:
- Grab the application. Caching stores some of your website files in a more convenient location, such as each visitor’s local machine, so you don’t have to download them every time you visit a new page. Some hosting plans like DreamPress include this feature by default, but there are many free caching plugins available.
- Use a content delivery network (CDN). Instead of distributing files from a central server, a CDN allows you to store copies of files on a set of geographically distributed servers. This results in more consistent load times and lower bandwidth usage regardless of the user’s location.
- Upload your photo. Large image files load slowly over time. Reduces compress size without affecting quality. There are many free and paid solutions to help you do this, such as the ShortPixel plugin and the TinyPNG tool.
- Minify your code. By optimizing your site’s CSS, HTML, and JavaScript code, you can become more efficient and reduce your load times.
- Keep all aspects of your site up to date. Running your website with outdated software not only causes security issues but also prevents it from working effectively. You can avoid these issues by updating your plugins, themes and CMS.
While this may seem like a lot of work, many of these techniques can be implemented using simple, free solutions that require little or no configuration. As a result, your site should perform well on mobile devices and contribute to search engine rankings.
6. Mobile gives a new look
Pop-ups are widely criticized, but they are one of the most effective ways to attract visitors. That’s why we wouldn’t be surprised if your site has at least one or two strategic pop-ups designed to generate leads or provide important information to users.
Pop-ups are very effective, but they can affect your mobile experience. Screen space becomes more important on smaller devices, and medium-sized pop-ups can be more annoying than on desktop websites.
Some time ago, Google started allowing pop-ups and implemented a set of rules to ensure that these elements do not affect the user experience. These rules include:
- Make pop-ups as small as possible: On mobile devices, pop-ups should only cover a small portion of the screen.
- Blocking should be easy: It should be clear how mobile users can get rid of these pop-ups. In general, use buttons that are large enough to be clearly visible.
- Pop-ups containing sensitive information are excluded: The above notice does not apply to login dialogs, age verification forms, cookie notices, GDPR consent notices, etc.
As long as you keep this in mind when designing your popup, there is no risk of your site being affected. However, sites that do not follow the guidelines shown in the rankings may be penalized.
7. Choose a reliable web host
I’ve said it before, and I’m happy to say it again. Choosing the right web host for your site is one of the most important decisions you will make. The simple fact is that if you choose a host or plan that doesn’t provide the speed and resources you need, there’s nothing you can do to stop your website from performing well.
Web hosts do a lot to determine a site’s performance. When it comes to mobile optimization, speed is more important than ever. With this in mind, you should choose (or upgrade to) a plan that ensures consistently high performance and minimal downtime.
In most cases, the best option is to use a Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting plan. Because it is cheap while providing efficient performance. Dreamhost offers a variety of VPS plans for all types of WordPress projects.
If you want to get the most out of your web hosting, we recommend using a managed server. This means you can have a dedicated server for your site. This not only allows you to configure the server according to your exact needs, but also increases security and speed. It is an essential part of a mobile friendly site.
8. Create a mobile application
Finally, we come to the seemingly difficult solution. However, it wasn’t that long ago that mobile apps were limited to large websites and services. However, the market has changed a lot and now almost all businesses and organizations offer mobile apps in addition to standard responsive websites.
Building a standalone application provides many unique benefits that a simple website cannot. For example, you can subscribe and interact directly with the interface. Push notifications can also be used to engage users when posting content or sharing news.
You can code your mobile app from scratch (or hire a developer), but the easiest solution is to use a tool that turns your site into an app. AppPressure is one of the best optimization solutions for WordPress users.
It is a premium tool with plans starting at $59/month. So if you’re familiar with WordPress, you’ll find the application builder interface easy to use.
With this tool, you can quickly build location-based mobile apps for Android and iOS and share them with your users. For example, you can submit it to the App Store or offer it directly to your audience or customers.
Don’t wait for mobile fixes
We now live in a mobile first world. Many Internet users rely more on mobile devices than desktops. This means you need to carefully consider how your website will work and display on smaller screens. Optimizing your site’s performance by making it mobile-friendly is important, especially if you don’t want to be penalized by search engines.
Optimizing your website for mobile devices is very easy when you use WordPress. With the right plugins and themes, you can preview how your design will look on mobile. Combining this with tools like Google’s Mobile Friendly Test makes it relatively easy to create a site that looks good on smaller screens.