Making your website mobile friendly is not a choice anymore, it’s a necessity. If your site is not mobile-friendly, Google will lower your site’s ranking among search results. This is, in fact, the most recent development in the web’s overall shift to mobile. More and more people are now shopping online using a handheld device. Businesses that are slow to catch up are bound to lose the game.
Building a mobile-friendly website is not that hard, but misconceptions about the process are quite rampant. Making a site mobile friendly means, you are doing cross-platform development. It’s complex, but there are little workarounds that make the whole process a lot easier to comprehend. Here are several such easy ways to make your site mobile friendly and relevant:
1. Choose a Mobile Responsive Theme
Mobile responsiveness means that your website is viewable on screens of differing sizes. Adopting a responsive design can make the process smoother. If you are building your website using a CMS like WordPress, choose a mobile responsive theme. It should be indicated on the theme’s main page whether it is responsive or not. Responsive themes have flexible layouts and images, plus cascading queries. These features enable responsive themes to automatically detect the user’s screen size and orientation to adjust the layout in a viewable manner.
2. Avoid Creating a Separate Site for Mobile
It is possible to create a separate website for mobile users with an m. domain. But don’t. It may have been the norm a few years back, but it is not anymore. Developers used to pick and choose elements from websites to design a layout thought suitable for mobile audiences. The downside in this process is that you cannot determine which mobile content users may or may not like in advance. Also, mobile devices are much more advanced today than few years before and are perfectly capable of displaying many of the content seen on desktops. Plus, Google penalizes sites for duplicate content. So just don’t bother with creating a separate mobile site.
3. Add a Viewport Meta Tag
A viewport meta tag is a piece of code that allows web browsers to understand the scale and the size of the content. This is crucial for rendering content viewable on multiple screen sizes. If your site lacks this code line, then a mobile web browser will be unable to scale your site to a smaller smartphone screen.
4. Choose Font and Button Sizes Carefully
Desktop viewers can read any font size and see even the tiniest buttons. This is usually not the case with smaller handheld screens. So, choose the font and button sizes that are optimal for mobile screens. For the font, 14 is the ideal size. Buttons should be bigger than usual for the user to take notice. But not too big that the button takes the whole screen space.
5. Only Use High-Resolution Images
The latest mobile devices have very high-res screens that may even rival desktop screens. So, low-quality images will be immediately noticeable. If you want to give your users the best experience, always use high-quality and high-resolution images on your website. That would prevent unappealing pixilated or blurry images.
Now you will be able to build a highly responsive website and gain an edge over the competition.
Originally posted on March 15, 2017 @ 2:37 am