6 Tips to Improve the UX of Your Mobile Website.
It goes without saying that owning a website comes with a ton of different perks for your business. You can enjoy increased market visibility, larger audience, more sales, and, needless to say — more money.
However, running a website has quite a few aspects which would need your utter attention. You’d be wrong to assume that you can enjoy reaping the benefits without laying down the hard work first.
Over the last few years, trends have steadily shifted, displacing stationary computers with more mobile and flexible solutions. Nowadays people tend to surf the internet through their phones and mobile devices comparatively more, causing major changes in the field of web design.
Here Comes Mobile Friendliness and UX
Having a mobile version of your website is no longer an advantage — it’s nothing more than a sheer necessity. The debate of whether responsive design is needed was swiftly and definitively put to bed when Google announced its Mobile-First Indexing.
Put simply, websites which follow the best practices for mobile-friendly UX will be given preference when it comes to ranking. With this, Google has added yet another critical ranking signal which has to be accounted for by website owners.
This one may just as well be amongst the most important. But that’s a good thing. While you may have to put a bit extra effort to improve the mobile-friendliness of your website, once you’re done you won’t just see an improvement of your ranking, but an overly increased UX across the board, leading to further customer satisfaction.
While there are plenty of tools and frameworks for mobile app development that you can take advantage of, the truth is that there are a few quick and easy ways of single-handedly improving the UX of your mobile website.
6 Tips to Improve the UX of Your Mobile Friendly Website
1. Device-centric design
First of all, you’d have to grasp the fact that people behave in a different way when using their mobile devices. An informative Google research (PDF) revealed that users who surf on their smartphones and other types of mobile devices are usually goal-oriented.
In other words, they want to identify whatever it is that they are looking for in the quickest possible way.
What this signifies for designers and developers is that the website needs to have a fairly simple and clear layout. The latter should help the user get where he wants to be instead of making them search for it unnecessarily.
Ensure that your sitemap is perfectly optimized and that you have no repeating content, let alone pages.
2. Highlighted Calls to Action (CTA)
Building further onto the previous point, you really need to provide your users with a direct, definitive route to the CTA. Not only will this make them like you more, so to speak, but it increases the chances of having better conversion rates.
Ensure that your landing pages are constructive and powerful enough. Take advantage of powerful, yet elegant CTA buttons.
You’d be surprised to understand how effective a simple, yet well-designed and perfectly placed “get a quote” button can be.
3. Reduced Forms
When was the last time you enjoyed filling in a form? If you’re like most users — it was probably never. Let’s face it — no one likes filling out forms — they are just boring, oftentimes questionable and time-consuming.
Reduce the forms on your website to a minimum. If you can only have those which are absolutely needed for sales and regulatory purposes, that’s what you should do.
However, when you do use forms, make sure that you follow the above tip — highlight all the fields and especially the “submit” button.
4. Careful Usage of Images
Images can be awesome when it comes to visually representing a concept, but when it comes to using them on the mobile version of your website, they are generally a no-no.
You need to ensure that you are using the right server-side as well as client-side solution to guarantee that the images won’t reduce the loading speed. Therefore, make sure that the server you are using has lightning fast speed.
When it comes to the design itself, you need to ensure that images are perfectly optimized to fit the desired framework and overall concept.
Only use images when they are absolutely the best option in front of you. If they can be replaced with something else, for the most part, it’s better to do so.
5. Speed! Gimme What I Need!
Yeah! White Lightning! If you can make your website as fast as Billy Idol’s landmark hit, rest assured that you’ll do good.
Users don’t like having to wait — that’s a fact. If you make them wait — they’ll leave you — it’s as simple as that. In other words — speed is really what you need.
Google is also giving preference to websites which are loading quicker. If you are like a lot of regular website owners and run a WordPress-based venue, there are plenty of plugins that you can take advantage of. WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache are just a few to enlist. You can rest assured that the first thing any reputable marketing agency or SEO company would do when they take you up is to optimize your website’s loading speed. It’s oftentimes one of the factors which lead to the substantial short-term spike in ranking positions.
6. Add a Search Option
Search is undoubtedly one of the most important elements for every user. When you are starting to plan your website, that’s one of the landmark features you have to envision from the get-go. It enhances navigation and improves accessibility.
When it comes to UX on mobile websites, you can’t simply allow losing a potential subscriber or a client because he or she was unable to find what she was already looking for on your website.
A simple search is capable of doing miracles, so make sure to incorporate it!
Wrapping it up
We are far from claiming that these are the only or the best tips you can take advantage of. Improving your mobile website UX is an art and there are plenty of additional steps you can take to make it better.
However, these are fairly quick, easy to accomplish, and, on top of all that — they bring swift results!
Hopefully you’ve found value in the suggestions we made. Remember, though — your website is a reflection of your business and, as such, it needs to represent you in the best possible way!
