Home Articles Web design & development What is a responsive, mobile-friendly website?
In 2020, around 52% of users browsed websites using mobile devices, compared to an average of 37% in 2015. It’s likely your customers will be using their phones to access your website and using a search engine, such as Google, to find it. So if you want your website to be mobile-friendly – performing at its best at all times – it has to work anywhere, any time, on any device.
Make sure your website is mobile-friendly by following our suggestions below.
What are the benefits of a mobile-friendly website?
Having a mobile-friendly website provides both you and your visitors with a host of benefits. Whether you are keen to improve your search rankings, provide an enhanced user experience or remain competitive, a mobile-friendly website will improve your online presence and customer experience. All our websites are designed with mobile users in mind. Every website we develop is built to be responsive as standard, making sure all your users get an optimised experience.
Google even uses mobile-friendliness as a factor when ranking websites. In many cases, their bots evaluate your website only by crawling the mobile version of your website.
How can I make my web content mobile-friendly?
Mobile pages must be quick to load. Using lots of images and videos can increase your website page’s load speed and put users off. To help speed up your loading times on mobiles:
- Keep page content to the point, with no surplus content.
- Optimise image sizes – they need to be big enough to fill the space and retain quality, but not so big they slow down the site.
- Only use one or two simple, web-safe fonts throughout the website. Some fonts can affect download speeds so choose wisely. For example, Google Fonts download faster than Adobe Typekit.
- Ask your developer to remove unnecessary code and scripts which may be slowing your web pages.
- Check that all media and other content on the site is compressed or at the smallest size possible. E.g. CSS & JavaScript can be minified.
How can I make my web design mobile-friendly
Aim to keep your web design simple to make it easy for users to navigate your website. They won’t interact with something they can’t read or use.
- Make it easy to click links and buttons for fingers on a touch screen. The recommended size is around 48 pixels – which suits most peoples finger size.
- Choose a simple font that is easy to read on a small screen. We recommend 14-16pt size for readability.
- Users cannot hover on touch screens, so your website may need to display information differently. Also, pop-ups can be distracting on a mobile device and difficult to get rid of.
Most importantly, to be mobile-friendly, your website needs to be responsive.
What is a responsive website?
A responsive website will automatically adapt to fit the device it’s being viewed on. Your website must be designed to fit a small mobile screen or a large desktop, so your customers still get an optimised viewing experience.
You can check how your website appears to your mobile visitors using Google’s simple tool – you’ll be able to see instantly how it looks on any mobile device!
Benefits of a responsive website
Not only will having a responsive website provide your users with a good user experience, but it also means you have only one website and one URL. You will only have to publish your web content once; saving you time and money.
Having a single URL means that all of your links are directed within the same website and not a separate mobile site, which is a good thing. From a search engine optimisation (SEO) perspective, one URL can gather all links, Page Authority and Page Rank without the complications of separate sites. Another plus is that Google Analytics will give you a complete view of all this traffic, making the SEO of your website more effective.
