Mobile-friendly websites have the potential to rank higher on search engines. In fact, in a world full of smartphones, websites that are optimized for mobiles are more likely to succeed and gain more visitors. A website that is only designed for desktop computers limits its potential to grow. If you're a new blogger, sit tight for 6 proven tips that can make your website mobile-friendly and help you gain a bigger audience!
Image by Mudassar Iqbal from Pixabay
According to a report published by statcounter, almost 60% of the internet traffic share belongs to smartphones. So if you launch a new website, you can expect 60% visibility through smartphones alone. Now imagine having a website that is not optimized for mobile devices? You're only left with 40% potential. This is why smartphone optimization is very important for websites.
In the next section, we will be discussing proven tips to make your website mobile-friendly. So let's begin!
Make Your Website Responsive
The first and most important step to make your website mobile-friendly is to select a responsive theme for your website. A responsive theme adopts the platform the website is being viewed on. For example, if you'll open BlogiTalk on a desktop computer, you will see a desktop version of the site. If you open the same site on a smartphone, its theme will adopt the dimensions of the smartphone and make the layout mobile friendly for the reader.
Responsive themes work best on all platforms whether they're tables, Android televisions, or even car LCDs. By using a responsive template, you're making your website accessible to all kinds of users. A responsive theme is a perfect way to optimize a mobile site. The best part is, without putting in extra effort, you're targeting audiences on multiple platforms at once!
Use HTML5: Avoid Heavy Animations
HTML5 is not just an ideal language for website development, it's also an easily accessible language for most platforms. What most developers do is focus on adding beauty elements to their websites. These elements can include animations, floating texts, sliders, page-loading designs, etc. By adding these elements they're making the size of their website heavy.
Using heavy animations can make your website slow because the greater the size of the page, the more time it takes to load the web page for the visitor. In addition to this, some elements are supported on desktop computers but not on smartphones and vice versa. To avoid any inconsistencies across platforms, it is suggested to use fewer animations and more HTML while designing your website.
Keep things simple and you will get better results for sure. An important part of success is user experience and anything that goes against it is not recommended.
Lazy-Load Images
Images are an important part of any blog. Without images, users might not be interested enough to read through a whole block of text. By including relevant visuals in your articles, you can attract more users but visuals take up space and more space consumption can make the website slower. To overcome this problem, we suggest you use lazy-load techniques.
What is Lazy-Load? It's a method of loading images as visitors scroll through your article. So for example, if you've used 5 images in your article, not all of them are needed to be loaded at once. As the user will read your article and will get closer to an image, the image will load and the user will see it at the right time.
This technique can help you load your website quicker and is a good way to improve user experience.
Avoid Spammy/Scammy Practices
We've visited hundreds of websites throughout my life and we've seen many websites using popups, floating subscription boxes, and full-screen ads for different purposes. While these techniques attract user attention, they can be considered spam which is very annoying when it comes to user experience.
A popup or fullscreen ad might take up all of the space on a smartphone screen and sometimes it is difficult to close. If this happens, your users will bounce away and might never come back to your website!
Improve Website Loading Speed
Nobody wants to see a white mobile screen for more than a second. If your website is slow, users will see a white loading screen while they wait for the content to appear. An effective way to optimize a website for mobile is to improve its loading speed. If you have a blog that loads slowly, visitors will lose interest and move on to the next available blog.
Remember, there are millions of websites covering similar topics and if you can't sell your content within nano-seconds, you'll probably lose a valuable visitor. To optimize your website's speed, you can use a free WordPress widget or online tools if you have weak technical expertise.
CSS modification, image compression, good HTML to Text ratio, few widgets and smaller page size are all solutions to a slow-loading website.
Conclusion
We hope by now you know what mobile optimization is and how can we practically implement it to maximize our benefits. Mobile optimization is a key to the success of any website. By following our tips, you can definitely make your smartphone mobile-friendly and you might see results of it in weeks!
For more interesting tips and tutorials regarding search engine optimization and much more, keep visiting us regularly. Don't forget to share this article before you leave!