8 tips for creating mobile-friendly websites
In the last quarter of 2023, more than half of website traffic came from mobile devices. So for businesses big and small, creating mobile-friendly websites is essential.
If your business’s website isn’t optimized for mobile devices, it’s more likely that mobile users will navigate away from your website to find another business. Mobile-friendly websites rank higher in search engine results, regardless of whether users search from mobile or desktop. Because of this, you might struggle to reach potential customers without a mobile web design.
That doesn’t mean you need to be a professional web developer to succeed in creating a mobile-friendly website, however. By making a few optimizations to your current website, you can ensure visitors have a great experience on all the different devices they use to browse.
Why your business needs a mobile-friendly website
If your website isn’t optimized for mobile devices, then parts of your copy, images, and other webpage elements, like web forms and navigation menus, can get cut off or fail to load when people access your website from their smartphone or tablet.
Aside from providing a bad user experience to the potential customers who may be browsing your site on mobile devices, this also makes it difficult for your website to rank in search engine results.
Search engine algorithms use something called mobile-first indexing to rank websites in the search results. The algorithm looks at the mobile version of your website—not the desktop version—when deciding whether to include your site in search results.
If your site doesn’t load properly or has multiple errors in its mobile version, it won’t rank well. Search engines try to give their users the most helpful results possible. If their users are going to have a negative experience when they click on your site, then the search engine isn’t going to prioritize it for them.
The fundamentals of mobile-friendly websites
The most important element of creating a mobile-friendly website is ensuring you have a responsive web design. A responsive website has the functionality to change its layout to match the size and shape of the screen a website visitor is using.
For example, a website’s layout on a desktop computer might be wide with extra content—like ads or images—in the margins on the left and right sides. But if you look at the same website on a mobile device, the layout will be long and thin. The extra content will appear at the top or bottom instead of on the left and right, and images will crop or scale to fit the smaller screen.
Responsiveness is the fundamental requirement of mobile web design, but ensuring mobile users have a positive experience browsing your site is also important. A good mobile web design should be just as enjoyable to navigate, read, and browse on a mobile device as it is on desktop.
8 tips for creating mobile-friendly websites
You don’t need to be an expert in HTML or Javascript to create a mobile-friendly website design. In fact, you don’t need any web development experience at all. With these tips, you can create and manage your own mobile-friendly website. Even if you’re a small business owner with limited resources, you can reach customers searching for companies like yours from their mobile devices.
1. Choose a responsive website template
A website template makes it easy for anyone with limited web design experience (and even more limited CSS coding experience) to set up a site. It’s a great option for small business owners who want to build and maintain their own website.
With a template, your webpages come pre-designed. All you have to do is plug in your company’s branding, images, and information.
Be mindful when choosing a template, however. There are hundreds of options for WordPress templates. Make sure the template you choose features a responsive design and follows search engine optimization (SEO) best practices. You can also use a website builder like Squarespace, Wix, or even Shopify for an e-commerce website. All of these website builders can help you create responsive designs, and many have a free website option.
2. Create a user-friendly navigation menu
Your navigation menu is an important element of the user experience on your mobile site. If your mobile users can’t find what they’re looking for, they’ll leave.
The navigation menu should appear at the top of your homepage and every other webpage on your site and feature clear categories and subcategories. Adding a search bar to the navigation menu can also provide a better user experience by giving visitors more than one way to browse.
These best practices are important for the usability of both the mobile version and desktop version of your site. For the mobile experience specifically, make sure the name of each category and subcategory is easy to read and differentiate. No part of the words or navigation arrows should get cut off in the mobile version of your site.
Consult the mobile view frequently as you design your site, and ask your friends and family to try navigating it from their mobile devices and inform you of any obstacles they encounter.
3. Use a large font and short paragraphs
Because mobile screens are much smaller than desktop computer screens, potential customers won’t be able to see as much content at one time while browsing on mobile. Despite the smaller screen size, the font should still be large enough to read comfortably.
It’s also helpful to make paragraphs shorter. On a small screen, long paragraphs can look like an endless block of text. Web visitors can get discouraged if they feel like they could scroll and scroll and still never reach the end of a paragraph.
By keeping paragraphs short, your content will appear more manageable, which helps propel users through your webpages. Aim for blocks of text that are about 3-5 lines long on your desktop site, or no more than eight lines on mobile.
You should also use headers to break up your content. Headings make your webpages easier to skim. So when a mobile user scrolls through your site, it’ll be easier for them to find the portion of your content they need.
4. Keep your calls to action short
Having a clear call to action (CTA) can help increase your conversion rates from your webpages. But for mobile users, it’s important to keep your CTA short.
If you have a CTA button, it should scale to fit different screen sizes—just like the other elements of your site. The text on your CTA button should also fit on one line. So while a CTA like “Download your free e-book today!” might look fine on desktop, it’ll likely be too long for mobile screens.
Instead, keep your CTAs short and direct. “Download” or “Download now” would be enough to get your message across in the example above, especially since you’ll likely have information about the free e-book elsewhere on the page. “Sign up,” “Add to cart,” and “Read more” are all examples of short and effective CTAs you’ll see on mobile-friendly sites.
Did you know? You can set up a CTA on your Yelp Business Page using the Upgrade Package? Convert page views into calls, messages, and visits with a fully customizable call-to-action button.
5. Resize and compress your images
On responsive sites, sometimes the pictures will scale—meaning the proportions (or aspect ratio) will appear the same on any screen size.
Other times the images will crop, meaning the edges of the images might get cut off when switching from larger to smaller screens. So an image that looks like a rectangle on desktop might crop to a square on mobile. With some website templates, you might see both. For example, if you have a blog post, the body images might scale while the header image gets cropped.
Both of these are perfectly good options for creating a responsive website. Although if your images crop instead of scale, you’ll have to keep this in mind when choosing or creating images for your site. Make sure the images look good even if a portion of the sides are cut off.
More importantly, images should load quickly, so be sure to resize them appropriately. A width of 1050 pixels is standard for most websites, but for templates with larger images, you might need to go as high as 1600 pixels wide. After you resize your images, compress them.
Compressing images will decrease their load time. Faster load times provide a better experience across all of the different devices your website visitors use to browse and are especially important on mobile.
Mobile users are often away from home and off of Wi-Fi, which means their load time may already be slower. Optimizing it as much as possible on your end ensures a better user experience.
6. Keep pop-ups and forms from overwhelming the screen
In addition to images, you should also consider the size and load time of pop-up windows that appear on your site. Pop-up advertisements, or supplemental content like animations or videos, can easily take over the small screen of a mobile device and make your website look crowded and chaotic.
Make sure the “X” or exit button for your pop-ups is easy to see on a mobile screen. If it becomes too small on the smaller screens, then your mobile users will have a hard time closing pop-ups, which could disrupt their browsing experience.
For pop-up advertisements or videos that play while users continue to browse, make sure the pop-up doesn’t take up more than a third of their screen. Compress this content as well to ensure it uses as few megabytes as possible. This will help improve your page load time.
If your site features forms, like a “contact us,” appointment, or survey form, you might also want to keep that short for mobile users. Long forms may cause mobile device users to drop off and not complete the form.
7. Test your page load time
You’ve probably noticed by now that page load time matters. Ideally, you want your pages to load in under three seconds. You can check your load time for free using Google Analytics, which can show you both your desktop and mobile load times.
If your load time is higher than three seconds and you’ve already compressed your images and other data-rich content (like videos and pop-ups), then you may need to upgrade your website hosting plan. Different hosting plans allow for different gigabytes of data and support different numbers of monthly visitors. If your site uses more gigabytes or gets more visitors than your hosting plan supports, it’ll start to run slowly.
8. Track performance metrics for desktop and mobile
One potential customer might browse your site from different devices as part of their user journey, discovering your brand on their phone and later returning to your site from their laptop.
Monitoring your website’s metrics—like web traffic, bounce rate, session length, and conversions—separately for desktop and mobile devices gives you a better idea of how people are using your site.
For example, if your bounce rate is much higher on mobile than on desktop, that might tell you your mobile user experience needs to be improved. If people make most of their purchases from desktop, you might want to experiment with different CTAs on mobile to see if you can improve conversions there.
Track metrics separately so you can see how each device affects your user journey.
Make friends with mobile
If you want to reach customers online, your business needs a mobile-friendly website. Mobile web design will not only help you reach the more than half of customers who are browsing on mobile devices but also help you reach the rest browsing on desktop.
Search engines use mobile-first indexing to decide which websites should rank first in search results. If your website isn’t optimized for mobile devices, it won’t appear in search results.
Now that you know how to create a responsive website and provide the best user experience on mobile devices, learn four data-driven insights from GoDaddy to help your website rank higher and get discovered more often online.
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