We live in a mobile-centric world, and businesses nowadays face the challenge of having to optimize their online presence for mobile devices, or fall behind the competition. The reasoning behind it is simple – as more and more people across the globe continue to browse the web on handheld devices, companies are expected to deliver a seamless mobile experience.
While you could dabble with the idea of creating your own mobile app, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t re-optimize your website for mobile devices as well. If you are in the process of building your first website, however, then mobile optimization should be one of your top priorities.
With all of that in mind, today we’re taking a look at some of the key principles of mobile-friendly web design that you should follow in order for your website to generate mobile leads and conversions.
Build Mobile-first Landing Pages
When it comes to mobile web design, one thing that often gets overlooked is the importance of building mobile-first landing pages in addition to optimizing your web pages for mobile devices. Unlike your other webpages, landing pages serve a specific goal and have a single CTA to inspire visitors to complete a certain action.
These pages are essential for SEO and successful advertising, and using a landing page template to build mobile-friendly landing pages is essential for drawing in the mobile demographic. When people come across your products, services, or offers online, you want them to go to your landing page to complete an action quickly, not to peruse your website and get sidetracked.
To that end, prioritize mobile-first landing pages by:
- Scaling down the visuals
- Shortening the text
- Having a single focus and goal
- Optimize the sign-up form for mobile
- Focus on shortening the loading times
On your regular web pages, you should focus on much of the same tactics, but with a broader range of goals, CTAs, and navigation options. You want your mobile customers to navigate your entire website with ease.
Focus on Performance and Responsiveness
For a website to be truly mobile-friendly, we have to consider the time it takes for the pages to load as well as the overall responsiveness of the website. Performance is one of the keys to successful mobile optimization, and while it’s definitely not the only factor, it’s still a vital one. That said, the good news is that mobile devices are becoming more powerful by the day, able to take on the added load of content-rich websites without sacrificing performance.
But that doesn’t mean that you can get away with 4k videos and a lot of heavy visuals. Because remember, much of the responsiveness and performance will come from your side, not how powerful the mobile device is. For that and many other reasons, it’s best to keep your website light.
There is an overwhelming demand for the adoption of some capabilities that are deemed dull but vital practices in everyday online company activities, so make sure to develop quality design regarding requests for proposals, but first, make sure to understand what is a website RFP.
It’s also important to improve the site’s performance by:
- Choosing a dedicated instead of a shared hosting plan
- Choosing a distributed server network
- Leveraging compression for visuals
- Leveraging browser caching
- Minifying your website code
- Using a lightweight, optimized WordPress theme
Make Customer Service Easily Accessible
Easy and instant access to customer service can be one of the biggest sales channels for a growth-oriented website, as people need to be able to reach out to you at any moment. This will help them answer their questions about your products, brand, or services, and will help them make the decision to buy.
Unfortunately, this is where most mobile users decide to drop out. If they can’t find a quick and easy way to get in touch with you on your website via their mobile device, then they won’t be able to complete the desired action. That’s why integrating mobile-friendly support options is important, and why small business phone systems have been focusing heavily on mobile optimization in recent years as well.
Make sure to integrate a live chat function, but also a one-click phone call function so that mobile users can call you right away. Connect these features to your internal phone system to keep your support and sales staff connected to your customers at all times. Finally, in the realm of restaurant businesses, incorporating QR code menus can offer a convenient way for customers to access menus and place orders using their smartphones.
Scale Your Content Accordingly
One of the key pillars of mobile web design and good UX in general is content optimization. More specifically, it’s important to scale and optimize your written content to produce a well-rounded, positive experience while avoiding clutter.
Too much text can create a cluttered page, and it can make navigation difficult. Most importantly, though, too much text might not scale properly on smaller screens, leading to irregular breaks and blocks of text, cut offs, and more.
With that in mind, make sure to keep your sentences short, and your text concise and to the point.
Use QR Codes to Your Advantage
Finally, it’s important to leverage technologies that others might not be using, in order to give your website a competitive edge. QR codes are a great example of how you can boost the overall mobile experience on your site, especially for visitors who are browsing on their computers but want to complete an action on their mobile devices.
There are many things you can achieve with QR codes, and all you need is a dynamic QR code generator to specify what the different codes do, after which you can put them on the different pages on your site.
QR codes that lead to a newsletter sign-up form can be a part of your blog page, while sales-oriented QR codes that lead to product pages can be a part of your home page. The possibilities are numerous, and you’ll be giving people a quick and easy way to access your content on the go and share it with other mobile devices.
Over to You
Mobile-friendly website design should be your top priority whether you’re trying to upgrade your online presence or if you are building a new website from scratch. With the world becoming a mobile-dominant place, the mobile demographic will continue to rise in the years to come.
This means that growth-oriented companies not only need mobile-friendly websites, but also branded applications as well as mobile-friendly solutions and integrations to create a seamless experience on handheld devices. With that in mind, be sure to use these tips to make your website more mobile-friendly and attract more leads in 2022 and beyond.
