How To Make Your Website Mobile Friendly?

Most likely, you are viewing this on a mobile device. If you don’t like how the website is organized or the content is difficult to understand, you’ll most likely search elsewhere for the information you need. Now examine the opposite side of the equation: how many users you could lose if your website is not mobile friendly.

By ‘optimized’, we mean that your website should look excellent on small displays. It should also load quickly and be simple to use and engage with. If you can do it on a mobile device, your website should also look great on a full desktop screen.

In this article, we’ll discuss what mobile-first design is and why it’s important. First, we will discuss how to approach mobile design. Then we’ll show you some practical strategies to optimize your website for smartphones and tablets. Let’s get to it!

Why Mobile-First Design is Essential?

Nearly 84% of the world’s population owns a smartphone, and many have multiple mobile devices. That greatly outnumbers the number of people who have access to computers and laptops. 

In reality, many people rely solely on mobile phones to access the internet. It is frequently the only computer they have available. In any case, most people have their smartphones with them at all times.

Unsurprisingly, mobile traffic has expanded considerably in recent years. Mobile devices now account for more than 54% of all internet traffic, surpassing desktop usage. That compares to roughly 43% for desktop computers.

In practical terms, these figures indicate that if your website is not mobile-friendly, you may be losing a sizable number of users. With so much content available, your target audience (and consumers) are unlikely to tolerate a poor user experience. They will undoubtedly seek their needs elsewhere.

What Does “Responsive Web Design” Mean?

Responsive web design implies that no matter how large a screen is, a site will fill it appropriately and provide content in a straightforward manner. You can use this on a smartphone, tablet, laptop, or even a wristwatch.

When you explore a website, you should observe how it adjusts to the size of your screen. For large screens, elements will scale up to a point where they do not appear huge but are still simple to interact with.

The same goes for mobile devices. When utilizing a smaller screen, you want your site’s information to scale down, but not to the point that it becomes unreadable or impossible to engage with.

We refer to websites that can achieve this delicate balance as responsive. Website design and development go hand in hand here because the site’s graphical elements must scale. We use CSS and style-sheets in the background to control how the website displays on different screen sizes.

Until recently, responsive design was considered an afterthought. We used to create webpages exclusively on the desktop. Mobile design, like mobile traffic, now comes first. That is why you will frequently hear the term mobile-first in web design circles.

It’s crucial to grasp the distinction between responsive and adaptive design. Adaptive design involves creating multiple versions of a single page and presenting them to users according to the devices they use. That approach to web design is currently considered archaic, as responsiveness is a more efficient solution.

How to Think Mobile-First in Web Design?

Bryan Clayton, the CEO of GreenPal, spent nine months creating his company’s website from scratch. “Right out of the gate, there were major problems,” he said. “We believed that the majority of our users would look for lawn care services on their desktop or laptop computers. However, it became evident very quickly that more individuals were accessing the website via mobile phones and tablets than through desktop or laptop computers—4-to-1.”

The initial full-fledged desktop experience had a variety of bells and whistles, including animations. In addition, we had a plethora of other features that enhanced the desktop experience,” he stated. “The problem with this approach was that the desktop experience would not translate to a mobile web browser.”

As a result, the website became bloated and could not function properly on mobile. Users discovered that they had to pinch and zoom to complete the sign-up process.

After revamping the site to be mobile-first, Clayton discovered that 82% of people who started the sign-up process for a free price estimate finished the entire process on their mobile device or tablet. “Our mobile-first product is the only reason why we are even in the game today,” he said.

When it comes to mobile-first design, we can learn a lot from GreenPal’s experiences. Let’s start by talking about focusing on your target audience.

Focus on your target audience and solicit feedback from customers.

When redesigning a website, you’ll most likely need to determine how present customers interact with it. That includes reviewing metrics to see if engagement numbers differ across mobile and desktop users.

Analytics may suggest that mobile visitors have a greater bounce rate or spend less time on the site. These are clear indicators of a poor mobile user experience. If the data leans in that direction, your best bet is to ask clients what they like and dislike about your website.

Zondra Wilson, the owner of Blu Skincare in Los Angeles, discovered that her website was not mobile-friendly when she began soliciting comments from clients.

When I would ask my clients to submit reviews, they would remark they had no idea where to start.” she stated. “My clients would say they didn’t know where to begin when I asked them to submit reviews,” she said. “They struggled to find the products I posted or my blog when I inquired about them,” she stated. They had trouble using their cell phones to browse my website. Before they saw my first photo or any information about my business, they had to scroll all the way down. They didn’t know how to get to my website. After the first page, a lot of individuals gave up and quit reading. Many people became frustrated and stopped reading after the first page.

When Wilson changed her website to a more mobile-friendly version, she discovered that users were seeing more pages than usual.

There are many tried-and-true methods for optimizing a website for mobile devices. However, client feedback can often disclose aspects of the user experience that you might otherwise overlook.

Consider small screen sizes

Modern smartphones are strong, and the majority of your audience will have access to a reliable internet connection. However, you will want to ensure that your site loads as quickly as possible. This makes removing superfluous clutter one of the most effective design solutions. 

Vitaliy Vinogradov, CEO of Modern Place Lighting, discovered that transitioning to a mobile-first design resulted in 30% more conversions than desktop. “One important thing to do is to remove excess plugins, pop-ups, or any other screen inhibitors on the mobile version of the site,” he said.

His team went over the site and removed a few social sharing plugins that were taking up important screen space. When designing for huge screens, you may realize that you include a lot of components that aren’t very useful to consumers. 

“You need to design for small,” says Matt Felten, a Los Angeles-based product designer. “If you need to be more concentrated. You must reduce the amount of information and content.” Once your mobile site is live, you may not need to add anything to the desktop version.

Removing all of the visual clutter would not just improve your website’s mobile usability. It can also help visitors focus on the elements that are most significant. That includes calls-to-action, forms, postings, and other important parts of the user journey.

Refine your design aesthetic

“Consumers today expect more sophisticated design,” explains Felten. “There’s a big push to see the business cases of a beautiful and well-performing website,” he said. People will quickly get an unfavorable opinion of my goods if, as a small business owner, I don’t have a beautiful, responsive website when all of my competitors do.

A professional-looking website demonstrates that you care about offering a better user experience, not merely that you have a keen sense of design. Unless you work in an extremely narrow sector, buyers will always have other options online. As a result, it is critical that you present your site’s design in the best possible light.

Eight Methods to Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly

Now that we’ve established why it’s critical to optimize your site for mobile use, let’s get a little more practical. In the following sections, we’ll take you through some of the most important parts of developing a mobile-optimized website, from the simple to the technically complicated.

To increase the likelihood that your website performs well across all platforms and receives priority in Google’s mobile-first index, we recommend implementing as many of these strategies as possible. Let us get to work!

Test Your Site with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Tool

Before you take any more action, it’s a beneficial idea to assess how your site is currently performing in terms of mobile friendliness. This will help you focus on the areas of your site that need improvement and give you valuable advice.

One way to achieve this is by ensuring your website is accessible across multiple devices. Access the site using your own smartphone or tablet, and experience how it looks and feels to use. This allows you to get a sense of the loading times, how well the design works on smaller screens, whether the information is still readable, and how straightforward the navigation is to use.

Once you’ve done that, you can dig deeper with a dedicated testing tool. Fortunately, Google has launched a free tool that can show you if your site meets its mobile page guidelines. We appropriately call this the Mobile-Friendly Test tool.

The tool will yield a favorable result if the tested page is mobile-friendly. If Google finds potential improvements, it will suggest ways to improve the mobile experience.

Even if your site receives a positive overall rating, it may still have trouble loading certain assets. In that case, you will receive a notification of page loading difficulties. Clicking on that notification will display a list of assets that the testing tool was unable to load on mobile:

At this stage, you can address each listed issue in turn. For example, you may change your robots.txt file to allow Google to access prohibited files or correct any redirection issues.

Make Your Website Responsive Using Custom CSS

CSS plays an important role in the implementation of responsive web design. You’d be shocked at how much of a difference it makes to your website’s mobile friendliness and how little CSS knowledge you have. 

For example, you can utilize CSS to implement what are known as media query’ ranges. Media queries (or responsive breakpoints) allow you to instruct browsers when to load multiple layouts for a page based on the size of the screen being used. Media queries are an important part of HTML, CSS, and JS libraries like Bootstrap:

You may also use CSS to make your website more responsive in the following ways:

Creating a CSS grid layout:

Designs can be easily adapted to different screen sizes with the help of CSS grid layouts, like the one offered by Bootstrap. A layout with well-defined pieces allows you to control how they appear and how much space they take up on different screen sizes.

Layout elements are sized using percentages:

As you may be aware, CSS allows you to specify the height and width of elements in pixels and other units of measurement. To make your website more responsive, we recommend using percentages. In this manner, components like buttons should adjust easily as screens shrink. 

Changing font sizes with media queries:

Images and other visual elements on a page should not be the only ones that resize for smaller devices. Text must also be responsive, or you risk creating a mobile site where consumers can only read a few words before scrolling down.

Controlling the space between items:

CSS allows you to specify the spacing between items, so there is ample white-space even when pages are scaled down. 

If you’re experienced with HTML and CSS, creating a completely responsive website may be easier than you think. However, if you use a content management system (CMS) like WordPress, the entire process becomes a lot easier because you rarely have to deal with code, even while working on a responsive design.

Choose responsive themes and plugins

One of the most significant benefits of utilizing WordPress is that it is quite simple to design a responsive website with the CMS. In reality, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to develop a non-responsive website. As long as you choose your plugins and themes carefully, your site should be fine.

Fortunately, most popular themes are designed with mobile usability in mind. That implies that merely selecting the appropriate theme might save you a lot of time. This avoids the need to manually configure media breakpoints and create CSS grids.

If you want to see if a theme is responsive before installing (or purchasing it), we recommend that you view its demo. Many theme demos will feature previews of how their designs appear on smaller displays. You may also utilize a staging site to test new themes and determine how mobile-friendly they are.

When you create pages with the Block Editor or page builders like Elementor, you can preview how the design will look on different devices at any time. If you’re diligent about previewing designs, there’s really little reason for any of your pages to emerge out of the oven not being entirely mobile-friendly:

Because the Classic Editor is less visually appealing than the Block Editor, creating responsive pages is more difficult. However, you can still preview how pages appear at any moment. 

If you’re having trouble creating responsive pages, we recommend switching page builders and themes. Those can be significant changes for any page, so take your time and learn how the new plugins and themes function.

Test Your Website’s Core Web Vitals

Google’s search algorithms were recently updated, and Core Web Vitals are now included. These ‘vitals’ are a collection of measurements that provide information about the entire user experience. The following are the three main web essentials:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP):

This metric measures the time it takes for the page’s largest element to load. A low LCP score indicates that the website loads rapidly overall.

First Input Delay (FID):

The purpose of this statistic is to assess interaction. The FID score indicates how long it takes for a user to engage with a website as it loads.

Cumulative layout shift (CLS):

This indicates how much the layout of a page shifts’ or moves around while it loads. To minimize movement, aim for a CLS score near zero.

Putting a score on a website’s user experience is difficult. As a result, Core Web Vitals does not provide an accurate representation of a site’s total user experience. However, they allow you to assess the critical technical characteristics of every page that have a direct impact on how engaging it is for users.

Furthermore, Core Web Vitals is not a purely theoretical exercise. They directly affect search engine optimization (SEO) and page rankings. Google PageSpeed Insights, a free tool, allows you to assess core web vitals. When you enter a URL, PageSpeed Insights will provide an overview of its core web vitals:

Google, like the Mobile-Friendly Test tool, gives specific advice about how to improve your website’s performance. Because Core Web Vitals focuses on performance, most of the advice you’ll read here is related to speed optimization:

Keep in mind that PageSpeed Insights gives different scores for your website’s mobile and desktop’versions’. That means you may receive a different set of ideas for each edition. Focusing on mobile optimization ideas will significantly boost both sets of ratings.

Improve Your Website’s Loading Times

As we mentioned in the last section, website speed is especially important in a mobile-first society. Optimizing your site for speed can not only help you reduce bounce rates, but it will also improve the user experience, which is beneficial for your business line.

Testing your website’s core web vitals will provide an accurate estimate of how long it takes to load. Armed with this information and the tool’s performance improvement suggestions, you can begin working on optimizing your site’s loading speeds. Here are some of the most effective optimization techniques that you may use on your website:

Implement caching:

When you employ caching, some of your website’s files are kept in a more convenient location (such as each visitor’s local device), eliminating the need to download them every time a new page is requested. There are numerous free caching plugins available, and some hosting plans, such as DreamPress, incorporate this capability by default.

Use a content delivery network (CDN):

Instead of distributing your files from a single central server, a CDN allows you to keep copies of them over a network of geographically distributed computers. This improves loading speeds independent of the user’s location while simultaneously decreasing bandwidth usage.

Compress your images:

Large image files are typically to blame for delayed loading times. By compressing them, you can lower their size without sacrificing quality. There are several free and commercial solutions for this, including the ShortPixel plugin and the TinyPNG utility.

Minify your code:

By optimizing your site’s CSS, HTML, and JavaScript code, you can improve its efficiency and reduce load times by seconds.

Keep all components of your website up to date:

Using obsolete software to run your website not only exposes you to security risks, but also stops it from working optimally. You may avoid these issues by constantly updating your plugins, themes, and CMS.

While this may seem like a lot of work, the majority of these strategies can be performed with simple, free solutions that require little to no configuration on your behalf. As a result, your website should run much better on mobile devices and have a competitive advantage in search engine rankings.

Design Your Pop-Ups for Mobile Devices

While pop-ups receive a lot of criticism, they are still one of the most efficient ways to capture a visitor’s attention. As a result, we wouldn’t be surprised if your site has one or two strategically placed pop-ups aimed at harvesting leads or providing consumers with important information.

Pop-ups can be quite useful, but they can also have a detrimental impact on the mobile experience. On a smaller device, screen space is more crucial, and even medium-sized pop-ups can be significantly more intrusive than on your website’s desktop version.

Google started cracking down on pop-ups a while ago by developing a set of standards that these elements must follow in order to not negatively impact the user experience. The rules include the following:

Pop-ups must be as unobtrusive as possible: on mobile devices, they should only take up a small portion of the screen.

They should be simple to dismiss: It should be obvious how mobile users may dismiss the pop-up, usually via a clearly visible, reasonably sized button.

Pop-ups carrying necessary information are exempt: The aforementioned criteria do not apply to login dialogs, age verification forms, cookie notices, GDPR consent messages, and other items.

As long as you keep these factors in mind while developing your pop-ups, your site should not suffer any unwanted consequences. However, websites that do not adhere to pop-up restrictions may face ranking penalties.

Select a Reliable Web Host

We’ve said it before and will say it again: choosing the appropriate web host for your website is one of the most important decisions you’ll make. The simple truth is that if you select a host or plan that does not provide the speed and resources you require, no amount of effort on your part will prevent your website from operating poorly.

Your web host will have a significant impact on how well your site works, and speed is especially critical for mobile-first optimization. With that in mind, you’ll want to select (or upgrade to) a plan that ensures continual high performance and low downtime. 

In most circumstances, the ideal alternative is to use a virtual private server (VPS) hosting plan, which is typically less expensive while providing excellent performance. DreamHost provides a wide range of VPS plans for a variety of WordPress projects, including: 

If you require even more from your web hosting, you may want to consider a managed dedicated server, which allows you to use a server that is solely dedicated to your website. Not only does this allow you to tailor the server to your specific needs, but it also improves security and speed, all of which are critical components of a mobile-friendly site.

Develop a Mobile Application

Finally, we arrive at a solution that may appear drastic at first glance. After all, not long ago, mobile apps were limited to huge websites and services. However, the market has evolved substantially, and practically any type of business or organization now provides a mobile app in addition to its normal, responsive website.

Developing a dedicated app has numerous advantages over a regular website. For example, it allows you to provide subscriptions and manage them directly from your own interface. You can also utilize push notifications to capture people’ attention while posting content or sharing news.

While it is feasible to create a mobile app from scratch (or hire a developer to do so), a much simpler solution is to use a program that converts your website into an app. AppPresser is an ideal solution for WordPress users.

This is a premium tool, with options beginning at $59 per month. You receive an elegant app builder interface that should be simple to use if you’re comfortable with WordPress.

This application allows you to easily create a mobile app based on a certain website for both Android and iOS, which you can then share with your consumers. For example, you might submit it to an app store or make it available directly to visitors or subscribers to your website.

Mobile Optimization Cannot Wait

We currently live in a mobile-first world. The majority of internet users rely on mobile devices rather than desktop computers; therefore, you should carefully evaluate how your website operates and appears on smaller displays. Especially if you do not want to get penalized by search engines, you must optimize your website so that it functions well and is still navigable on mobile devices.

If you use WordPress, you can easily optimize your website for mobile devices. Using the correct plugins and themes, as well as seeing how your designs look on mobile, will help you a lot. When combined with tools like the Google Mobile-Friendly Test, it’s a breeze to develop a site that looks excellent on small devices.