How To Make A Website Mobile Friendly?

What Is a Mobile Friendly Website?

Since the year 2015, Google has forced the website owners to make their websites mobile friendly. But what does that mean? What a mobile friendly website is?
Let’s try to understand it…

A website that is designed to work the same way across all the devices, is a mobile friendly website. This means that the website works well on computers, tablets and cell phones without zooming or adjusting the settings. Also, the text of a mobile friendly website is readable, the website can be navigated easily and the user can conveniently find what he or she’s searching for.

What Does A Mobile Friendly Website Look Like?

So, as we know what a mobile friendly website is! Let’s now move on to understand what it looks like.

Before that, it is very important for you to know that about 52.2% percent of the web traffic originated from mobile devices. That’s why it has become very important to make your website mobile responsive.

So, there are four components of a mobile friendly website, they would help you to know how a mobile friendly website looks like. They are as follows:

1. Responsive Display

The foundation of a mobile friendly site is the responsive design. If your site doesn’t have a responsive design then a tablet or cell phone user will witness a shrunken form of your desktop website. That means the user will have to scroll either horizontally or vertically to find out anything. And you know what? After facing all these issues, they might leave and visit some other website.

A well responsive website design, whether it is based on a template or is custom-built, spontaneously displays your website perfectly on different types of devices.

2. Readable Font

The second thing that a mobile friendly website contains is easily readable fonts. Of course, you can make them more attractive according to the design of your website. But don’t forget that it should be readable.

However, the most easily readable font on mobile devices is Sans Serif. Also, make sure to make the font size bigger as no one would want to give pain to their eyes by reading the tiny texts.

3. Well Formatted Text

The text of a website should be properly formatted. So, make sure to keep text blocks shorter and try to break them with bulleted lists and headlines.

Moreover, it’s tough for our eyes to keep track of closely knitted lines. That’s why a mobile friendly website contains small and easily readable paragraphs.

4. Optimised Media Display

A mobile friendly website looks perfect in all ways. That means a mobile friendly website has images, videos and everything else in the perfect position.

To make sure that it’s perfect, test all the infographics, videos and images to assure that they look well on all the devices. That too without needing to zoom or adjust.

Is My Website mobile friendly?

After knowing what a mobile friendly website is, are you wondering if your website is mobile friendly or not? C’mon, let’s find out!

Well, if you have created your website in the past few years, then the chances are that your website is already updated and mobile friendly.

New CMS or content management systems are already based on the knowledge that every website should be mobile friendly. That is, it should work well on all the devices. Moreover, templates and themes available on different platforms are well responsive, which signifies that they can adapt well to your screen.

Furthermore, one other way to know if your website is mobile friendly or not is by reading all the documents of the template you’re currently using or by just loading it from different mobile devices.

Wait, even after doing all this, it doesn’t imply that your website is hundred per cent ready to be used by mobile users. The design alone is so important, but you need to know how fast the loading time of your website is. For that, you need to take some simple website tests.

The quickest way to tell if your website is mobile friendly or not is by performing a Google mobile friendly Test. To perform this test, you just need to enter the uniform resource locator or URL of your website. Then, Google will load your site into a tiny copy of a smartphone and then it will share the outcomes with you.

Well, if you are keen to learn more about the technicals of your website then there’s one more test that you can take online. It is none other than the GTmetrix test.

It will also let you enter the URL of the website ( just like the Google mobile friendly test) but rather than simply telling you that your website is mobile friendly. This test shows you the different results such as structure and performance report. Then it will give you grades accordingly.

If you look at all the details carefully then you will be able to understand the weaker points of your website. And this can prove to be the beginning point of your mobile optimisation strategy.

So, what do you say? Is your website mobile friendly? If it is, then you don’t need to worry. But if it’s not, then keep reading and you’ll surely be able to make your website mobile friendly. If you want to know in detail about how to optimise a website check out our article.

10 Ways You Can Make Your Website Mobile Friendly

The following are the ways using which you can make your website mobile friendly.

1. Choose A Mobile Responsive Theme

First things first, to make a website mobile friendly, make sure to make the theme of your site responsive. So, redesign your website using the best website designing practices.

Designing your website using a mobile-first strategy requires a lot of planning about how it will be used on different mobile devices. This helps in understanding which content will be uploaded on the website. It also brings up the question that, if that content is not required on mobile, then is it required on desktop?

In addition to this, a responsive design offers the best experience on mobile devices but it permits some enhancements to the design and functionality of your website as the size of the screen increases.

Most importantly, responsive design ensures that your website obeys all the devices and screen sizes. No matter what the size of the device, whether it’s a tablet or smartphone, your website should be consistent with each device.

2. Avoid Pop-ups

It is very tiresome for the users to come across unforeseen pop-ups while browsing the content on a site, most especially for mobile users. In some of the cases, the X mark is not even visible and this adds to the annoyance of users.

Designers and developers must make sure that if they wish to display ads, they do this in a way that doesn’t block the content on any device screen

3. Website Speed Optimisation

The other thing that will assist in making your website mobile friendly is speed. Speed plays an important role in creating the very first impression of any site.

Do you know that about 85% of mobile users expect that the pages should load faster than they do on desktop? Also, about 53% of users leave a website if it takes longer than usual to load? The speed can not be compromised.

In addition to this, speed also plays a big role in ranking on Google. To take benefit from this, the website developers must take all the required steps to increase the speed of your website.

Furthermore, to evaluate the loading time of any website, you can run a speed test on SpeedLab or BrowserStack. For that, you just need to enter the URL and click on the start button. Then, this tool will verify the speed of your website on various browser device combos. Also, it displays a score out of 100 for desktop and mobile platforms.

4. Use Standard Fonts

Most newbies don’t know that fonts are heavy. Loading the non-standard fonts on your website will increase your waiting time for mobile users and make it less customer friendly.

Alright, we know that you want a specific paragraph painted in your favourite colour and written in a stylish font that you saw on the website of one of your competitors or friends. However, a standard font will look more good, and remember that it will make your website look better and load faster.

So, you decide… Do you wish to sacrifice losing your visitors just because of the stylish fonts? Not! That’s why make sure to use the standard fonts, they will make your site look good and load faster.

5. Keep the Design Of your Website simple

Simplicity is the best! If you have not decided on a template yet, then make sure to keep simplicity in mind. The mobile devices have small screens comparatively, which means that only a few elements can be displayed on them.

Moreover, not each image that you display on the desktop needs to be noticeable on the mobile screens. Also, not every menu icon or item needs to be included. All in all, a mobile website should be simple and sober. And, it should assist the users in getting all the information they need.

So, we guess you got the answer to your most basic question i.e., “How to create a mobile website”, right?

6. Bootstrap

Bootstrap is a CSS framework that consists of sensible defaults to scale a site automatically to the suitable screen size. On the one hand, Bootstrap makes things more convenient and on the other hand, it makes some designs difficult to implement. That’s why, before using it, make sure that the framework aligns well with the goals of your website.

Moreover, the prime motive of making your website mobile friendly is to ensure that your website scales to fit the screen of any device. The above-mentioned techniques can assist you with the content size, width and layout at the time of transitioning from a desktop device to a mobile device.

7. Make the button size large

Every website includes buttons to link through to the other forms or sections. But a good button can instantly become a bad button if it is placed the wrong way or in the wrong size. Also, think about how you hold or use your phone. Most probably, you use your phone with your thumb. That means anything else that is not in your thumb’s reach will become an obstacle.

So, make sure to keep the size of the buttons large.

8. Optimise The Images

At the time of dealing with the mobile sites, the main goal is to design the smallest possible size without losing the overall quality of the images. The reason behind this is, mobile devices have smaller bandwidth as compared to desktops. So, the larger images will take extra time to load.

Also, many mobile users buy a limited data plan, so the small images will help them to use fewer data.

There are two ways to optimise the images, they are:

• By making use of digital editing software or
• By making use of the plugins.

Moreover, if you wish to optimise your images by using any digital editing software, then you have to do so before the files are uploaded. Other than this, you can make use of tools such as ImageResizer, TinyPNG or Adobe Photoshop.

9. Make Use Of Media Queries

Alright, we understand! Media query sounds more like you got to talk to a journalist or something, but that’s not the story. Here Media means the content that you are delivering to the end-user. Media queries are the most famous techniques for delivering a tailored sheet to various devices.

Moreover, they let you ask a device about its size, then they direct the browser to show the things by following the set of CSS that you have already set.

Media queries are an integral part of most mobile friendly websites. But you need to be sure that the system is properly arranged for all the devices that are currently in use, and not just three or four most popular devices.

Also, make sure to look at the list or any subscription that collects all the information for you.

10. Keep Testing

Lastly, keep testing! The most effective way to ensure that your site offers an optimum user experience is by testing it on real mobile devices. By testing on mobile devices, you can easily detect and resolve the issues or shortcomings that a user might face in the future.

Make sure to run the website on as many devices as you can. By doing so, you will be sure that the customers experience effective and effortless browsing regardless of whatever device they are using.

Furthermore, testing the sites across real android and iOS devices can be quite tough without having access to the complete infrastructure of the test. Also, it is not at all attainable for each organisation to have an on-premise lab as it asks for a lot of investment. Rather than this, you can use a cloud-based platform to test because it provides the benefits without any maintenance.

Conclusion

So, that’s all! It’s time to wrap up this article on ” How to make a website mobile friendly”. To conclude, we would say, make sure to follow all the above-mentioned steps to make your website mobile friendly. Also, make sure you already know how to build a mobile website before doing all this!

Also, we would like to add that, technology is advancing day by day, what’s trending today might be outdated tomorrow. Likewise, the way mobile devices function will continually change. That’s why it is very important to keep testing and tweaking when and wherever needed. Also, always keep the mobile users as your priority and then everything would just go fine!

Most importantly, thank you for sticking to the end of this article. In case, you have any queries, confusion or questions you can reach out to us. We at RVS Media Limited are right here at your service.