10 Ways to Make Your Site More Mobile Friendly

Smartphone usage is showing no sings of slowing down, with 72 percent of adults in the U.S. owning a smartphone – the fourth highest percentage in 40 countries considered in a 2015 survey – and 89 percent of U.S. adults accessing the Internet on a daily basis. These days it’s imperative to have a mobile-friendly site, since commerce trends & reports have been showing that more and more people are using their phones to surf the web, do research, and make purchases. With Google’s recent announcement that they want more mobile-friendly sites and relevant app content in the search results, now is the time to get ready for this upcoming change by making your business site mobile friendly!

Here are some ways to help make sure your site doesn’t get abandoned before it loads, is extra under friendly and attractive, and is overall ready to be viewed on phones:

1. Take Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. This quick tool analyzes your URL and gives you details on which parts of your page are not optimized for smartphones, pointing out text sizes, links, and mobile viewpoints, and showing you how your page appears on Googlebot.
2. Enter your information in Google’s Mobile Usability report, which can fix potential mobile issues on your site.
3. Consider a responsive template or theme. Many designers who have made their templates available have also thought about their users by incorporating measurements that adapt to smartphones, tablets, desktop or laptop computers.
4. Incorporate meta tags, especially for the viewport. The browser uses this code to scale and size the page, adjusting fonts, graphics and buttons according to the device.
5. Fonts should be sized to at least 14 pixels, with 16 CSS pixels as the standard size across the industry.
6. Graphics on  websites should be JPG, PNG or GIF files. Optimizing graphics for your website includes converting them to RGB color mode and 72 dpi. These sizes will allow your graphics to load faster and give a clear view of the image.
7. Larger buttons make clicking with fingers easier than smaller buttons, which are better for a computer mouse or touchpad-guided pointer.
8. Simplify your design. Rather than including complicated, intricate site maps, create an easy-to-navigate site that gets to the point and places necessary information in a prominent spot.
9. Put your important information “above the fold,” a print term for putting the most newsworthy content in the first place readers look. Rather than scrolling through pages, especially on smaller smartphone screens, users see the priority information first.
10. If years have passed since you published your site, it might be time to consider hiring a designer to give your site a makeover. Creating fresh content and a framework that is responsive to the broad range of screens being used to go online can be worth the investment in the long run.

Don’t be left in the dust as your audience moves to mobile! As always, if you need a hand making the switch, drop us a line!