How to make your user’s experience better on mobile devices

At some point in time, we’ve all experienced a broken and buggy website on our phones. Either the text is too small, the buttons are too close together, or you’re having to pinch and zoom just to read the content. It’s frustrating, and a surefire way to drive customers away from your business.

Having a site that is optimised for mobile is becoming increasingly important – mobile accounts for over half of all global web traffic. In Q4 of 2022, mobile devices accounted for 59.16% of web traffic worldwide. Having a high-quality mobile website can set your business apart from competitors and give your customers an overall better experience. This blog will provide key tips for optimising your mobile-friendly website design today!

Tips for mobile-friendly website design:

1 – Design for mobile first

One of the most effective ways to design a mobile-friendly website is to design it for the mobile user first. Then you can expand it to suit a larger screen, as it is easier to scale up a design than it is to decide what components you need to get rid of.

This, in turn, will ensure that you are optimising for where the majority of your clients see your website, giving them a better user experience overall.

2 – Use a responsive design

It’s important to use a responsive design that is adaptable to different browsers and devices. Using responsive units reduces the effort required to adapt your website for mobile devices. Responsive units, such as using a percentage text size instead of pixels, adjust the text size based on the user’s device. This ensures a consistent layout across all platforms.

Decluttering your website means simplifying the layout, removing unnecessary elements, and prioritising important content. This streamlines the website and makes it easier to navigate to different screen sizes. You can have two versions of your website, one for desktop and one streamlined for mobile. Most website builders give you the option to hide certain elements from mobile.

3 – Compress images and videos

Compressing images and using the JPEG format can significantly reduce the file size and make them a lot easier to load on mobile devices. You don’t need to have large high-resolution images on a smaller screen, it just doesn’t make a difference.

Hosting videos on a third-party platform and embedding them on your website can also improve load speed, ensuring a better user experience on mobile. Google Pagespeed Insights give you the ability to test the speed of different pages on your website. You can adjust this to mobile only which can give you a good insight into whether you need to make any adjustments.

4 – Avoid pop-ups and space out your links

Unoptimised pop-ups can create a frustrating experience for users on mobile devices. They can be difficult to close and may require precise clicks or scrolling. It’s best to avoid pop-ups altogether on mobile websites to ensure a better user experience. While pop-ups may still be used on computer view, it’s important to minimise their use on mobile devices wherever possible.

Improving the spacing between links is a simple yet effective way to enhance the user experience on mobile websites. Consider using buttons instead of hyperlinks, as buttons provide large clickable areas, making it easier for users to navigate and interact with your website on smaller devices.

5 – Change where your content is displayed

When switching a website to a mobile view, important information can end up being placed too far down the page. It’s best to give the important information upfront and avoid excessive scrolling. It’s all about making the user’s experience as easy as possible.

You should also test the website regularly and on multiple different devices and browsers as they are not all the same. You can also run the website through Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test, which can test your mobile optimisation as a whole.

Why should you optimise for mobile?

Optimising your website for mobile devices is crucial in today’s digital world. By using these design tips you can provide your users with a better experience when browsing your website.

Tools like Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test and Google Pagespeed Insights could give you a valuable understanding into the speed and user-friendliness of your website. These tools can help guide your design decision-making process when you are optimising your website design for mobile devices. Making mistakes in mobile optimization can frustrate customers, so it’s important to get it right.