Here are some helpful tips on how to improve your site on a mobile device.
The significance of a mobile website and its functionality is increasing rapidly. Google has now divided rankings into separate measurements for mobile and desktop platforms, with varying weightage assigned to different attributes. For instance, the impact of poorly optimized images on desktop machines is considerably less severe compared to their impact on mobile devices.
To enhance your mobile website’s performance and achieve higher rankings on Google, here are five actionable steps you can take.
1. Optimise your images
The first tip on how to improve your site on a mobile device is image optimisation.
There are essentially two methods to accomplish this task. The first approach, accessible to anyone with a computer, involves simply reducing the dimensions of an image. If your logo will never exceed, let’s say, 400 pixels in width, is it truly necessary to upload a high-resolution logo that is 2500 pixels wide?
The second approach for optimization is to utilize image optimization software to process your JPEGs and PNGs. For PNG files, a highly recommended option is tinypng. These software tools eliminate non-required data from the images, reducing their file size while generally preserving their quality.
2. Streamline Content
Simplify your content for mobile viewing. Condense lengthy paragraphs, break up text into smaller sections, and utilize bullet points or subheadings to enhance readability. Remove any unnecessary elements or large media files that might slow down loading times on mobile devices.
If you are using Elementor in your wordpress website, you can make use of the responsive settings to only show certain blocks of content on a desktop and on a mobile, therefore almost creating a bespoke mobile version of your website with a few clicks!
Ask us about the Elementor hack to really zone in on optimising your content for mobile devices.
3. Touch-Friendly Elements
Design your website with touch-friendly elements to facilitate easy interaction on mobile screens. Ensure that buttons, links, and form fields are large enough to be tapped accurately, with sufficient spacing between them. This minimizes the chances of users accidentally clicking the wrong element.
4. Optimize Page Speed to Improve Your Site On Mobile
Mobile users have less patience for slow-loading websites. Optimize your site’s performance by compressing images, leveraging browser caching, and minifying code. Aim for quick load times to provide a smooth and efficient browsing experience for mobile visitors.
If you are using WordPress there is a multitude of Caching plugins that you can install to assist with speeding up your website. Please ensure the plugin you are using is compatible with your web server.
5. Reduce the number of plugins
Avoiding excessive use of plugins can be challenging when building a website yourself. Plugins often provide added functionality without requiring technical expertise. However, each plugin you incorporate introduces additional stylesheets and JavaScript files. As the number of plugins increases, so does the number of stylesheets and JS files, resulting in a slower website performance.
Many people wonder why they should pay for a website when they can use a free service, and this is one of the reasons. Free services aim to cater to a wide range of users, loading all available plugins. Consequently, this leads to slow and cumbersome websites, ultimately negatively impacting their ranking on search engines like Google.
Summary
Should you have any concerns about how to improve your site on a mobile device and/or mobile optimisation of your website, speak to us today to see how we could rapidly increase usability, speed and visual aspects of your website on mobile devices.
