Ever found yourself struggling to read from a website when you use your mobile phone?
You also have to squint your eyes at times and pinch and zoom in to make the text or image clearer?
Can be annoying and draining, isn’t it?
Surely, you don’t want your audience to feel the same inconvenience when they view your website through their phones, right?
Well, along with the different upgrades we get in technology, are upgrades and updates in the way our websites work.
One of those upgrades is what we call “Mobile Website”
What is a “Mobile Website”?
No, it’s not a website that is capable of moving.
It’s a website that has an interface compatible with the size of the screen of a mobile phone.
That means, no more squinting or constant pinching and zooming in on your mobile phone screen.
The interface of the website will automatically confirm or adjust accordingly to the size of the screen you are using.
Brilliant, right?
Why is there a need to update or upgrade to a Mobile Website?
There are two main reasons why you should update to a mobile website.
We are now at a very fast-moving age. People are always on the go and want to get things done immediately.
So, imagine if one of your clients is trying to access your website to get a subscription.
Your web page is not yet mobile friendly.
He can still access it through his smartphone but in desktop mode.
Well, because your website is still in desktop mode, it will probably take about a couple of minutes for it to fully load on his smartphone.
And when it has finally loaded, it’s gonna look like how it is in a desktop view—small letters and images.
But that’s okay. He can just zoom in and out.
Do you think that’s gonna give him a good customer experience?
Probably not. He’ll likely feel discouraged and frustrated and would want to look for another that will give him a better experience.
The bounce rate will be high in this case.
That is why this mobile website interface was introduced to give your audience the customer experience they want.
Providing them with a good customer experience will not only win you one heart but several more!
2. Indexing
As smartphones continue to get upgrades and innovations, so has their value continue to grow evermore.
Smartphones have easily become an important part of our lives and a powerful tool at that.
And so, in recent years, Google has started to implement mobile-first indexing for all websites.
That’s no wonder.
Google has put a heavier weight on websites that are mobile friendly because we heavily depend on our smartphones now.
Not just for communication and entertainment.
But also to get information and shopping!
That is why it has become even more important than ever to optimize your mobile website for search.
This trend has been going for years now and it will continue to do so.
With that, search engines have conducted experiments on making their index prioritize mobile website versions of pages.
They have done this since 2016 so that they will be able to flow with the trend and address the shift in the way users access digital information.
And so should you!
To be a part of the relevant results that search engines offer to their users, you must make the necessary update and make websites mobile friendly!
How to optimize mobile website
To keep you in the loop of trendy and mobile friendly websites, here are a few tips on how to optimize website for mobile search.
1. Test your website’s mobile-friendliness
Before doing an overhaul of your website, you want to test it first for mobile-friendliness.
Who knows, you might just need a little tweaking here and there and not an overhaul.
This saves you time and effort.
You can start by accessing your website on a mobile device.
You can also use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to view your website on mobile devices.
This helps you get an idea of what the user experience is like when visitors look at your site from a smaller screen.
So, pay attention to loading times, image quality, navigation, and content readability
In doing these steps, you will not only be able to assess the user experience on your website but also identify the specific areas that need your attention.
2. Use responsive mobile website builders
Set your website up for mobile search success by using a responsive mobile website template.
This is one area that seems to be overlooked quite a lot especially when users create mobile websites using mobile website builders.
Yes, there are a lot of mobile website builders out there that can offer you free or less costly mobile website template.
However, you need to make sure as well that your choice of platform can provide you with templates that will render well in different screen sizes and website browsers.
They might cost you a little more but it’s a worthy investment if you want to stay relevant.
And you don’t need to look far.
Strikingly stays on top of user experience trends by making sure its templates will work well on different screen sizes.
Using a reliable mobile website template will assure you that you won’t have to write a code or make any changes to your site’s stylesheet for your different design elements to show up correctly on a mobile device.
3. Check your page speed
Loading speed is a significant element that contributes to the overall user experience in today’s mobile era.
Even websites that are reliable and informative get pushed aside because their web pages load slowly.
And people today hate that.
In this fast-paced world, people want their information almost automatically.
Some even want their information in a snap!
There are only a few users who will gladly sit around and wait for your page to load.
While most of them will most likely click back to the search results page and move on to the next site on the list.
So if your website is still on desktop mode or is still not mobile friendly, then less likely people will stay on it and wait for your content to load.
That is why your website should be able to keep up with the growing number of impatient mobile users worldwide.
To help improve the loading speed of your website, keep your visuals like images and videos as light as possible.
That doesn’t mean you’ll have to sacrifice the quality.
There are ways to keep the media in your website light but clear and not mediocre.
By the way, before uploading those to your mobile website, check first with your free mobile website builders for guidelines on the right image sizes and files that you can use on your site.
This is to ensure that they load well on mobile devices and help keep your mobile website’s loading speed short.
If you are a Pro account user, Strikingly also features Accelerated Mobile Pages for its blog section.
This is a new technology that enables sites to load faster on mobile devices.
Simply activate this feature on your automobile website design editor and you’ll be good to go!
4. Improve on-page and local optimization
To improve user experience and help Google bot understand your website better, make sure to optimize your site’s titles and site descriptions.
To do that, you need to make use of keywords.
These keywords will help Google Bot to identify what your content is all about.
It will also help Google Bot to understand and see whether your content is reliable and helpful.
With that, Google might just be able to rank you higher and keep you on the first page of their search results.
And who knows, your mobile website might end up being the featured snippet in Google!
By the way, keep your website’s title and description straight to the point and brief.
So that when people search for you in the different search engines, your website’s name and description will be fully read.
Especially if they are using their smartphones which have limited screen area.
Make sure that you optimize other on-page elements as well.
You can do this by adding alternate tags to your images.
Organize your content in such a way that navigation will be easier.
Local search algorithms changed when Google rolled out the Possum update.
It will be good to take note of these updates so you can keep up with them as well.
Mobile search is extra crucial for you if your business website is meant to drive foot traffic into your physical store.
To improve your mobile search visibility, you want to consider including your city and state in your title tags, meta description, and ideally, in the URL.
Make sure that you indicate an updated business address and phone numbers as well.
Those are only some of the things that you can do initially to assess your website’s mobile friendliness.
Doing so will not only help you keep up with the trend but also help you keep yourself relevant as you provide quality experience to your audience.
So go and test out your website now.
Strikingly will be there to be your help and guide!
