Back in the heady days of 2008, analysts predicted that mobile internet use would take over desktop internet use by 2014. At that point, it seemed like a bold prediction, considering that accessing the internet on your mobile was still somewhat difficult and fraught with issues. Furthermore, since everyone was designing websites primarily for desktop use, why would users choose to visit glitchy mobile sites?
Flash forward to 2020 and the internet is used on mobile at least twice as much as from a desktop browser. Despite the initial challenges associated with browsing the web on mobile, people quickly switched over. The internet could not stay confined to offices and homes, and web designers had to adapt.
Today, if you haven’t designed your website with mobile in mind, you have severely limited your future success. If you’re learning how to make money blogging, you may not immediately think of mobile optimization as your number one concern. Chances are, you’re not entirely sure how to go about it.
Don’t worry. It is easy to optimize your website for mobile with these 5 strategies.
1. Consider Mobile First
The most effective way to optimize your website for mobile is to actually go about the process the other way round. Instead of creating a desktop website, you design your website for mobile. This approach is called mobile first, and is a really great idea for bloggers in particular. It is far easier to take a mobile website and optimize it for desktop use when you’re not relying on complex web design and development. Thus, if you’re focusing on text and images rather than complex scripts, consider starting with the mobile website.
Google now takes a mobile first approach, giving precedence to websites which load quickly on mobile.
2. Design Fluid Layouts
If you’re hoping to make complicated design choices that result in a unique layout and user experience, you are going to struggle with mobile optimization. The problem is that screen sizes vary and you would have to design your layout to suit every phone, tablet, and desktop computer. Sometimes complex layouts are necessary, and you will just have to put in the work. But most websites can have fluid layouts which will work on screens of every shape and size.
That does not mean you shouldn’t compare how it looks on the different devices. Even fluid layouts can end up looking all wrong if text boxes appear empty or images shift to a strange position.
3. Don’t Hide Content
How often have you visited a mobile version of a website and struggled to find what you came for? Unfortunately, many web designers think that they can get away with putting content in hidden menus on mobile or leaving out sections altogether. This can lose you visitors fairly quickly, as they are unlikely to stick around to try and find something they don’t even know is there. Menus that are only marked by a couple of dots in the corner may contribute to a minimalistic look, but will also minimize the time visitors spend on your site.
4. Don’t Force Visitors to Resize
You may run into struggles with text and images that look great on your desktop site but end up being too small to properly see on mobile. Don’t simply assume that visitors will zoom in or resize the page. Firstly, some mobile website clients make it difficult to zoom. Secondly, it destroys the seamless nature of your website – visitors lose their place when reading text or lose track of where they can find your menus and links.
5. Resource Optimization is Crucial
In general, having photos and other media on your website that is resource-heavy is a bad idea. It is generally better to have a page which loads immediately than to use high definition images. This becomes all the more important on mobile. With mobile, the problem is not just that the page will load slowly, but that you will drain visitors’ mobile data. When they are not using wifi, the last thing they want is a photo they’re not even interested in eating up megabytes of precious data.
Compress your images or use alternative file formats. If the photos are particularly important or you really want users to have the chance to see them in all their glory, allow users to click through to a high quality rendering.
What’s Next?
Designing mobile optimization should not be the last time you think about user experience. Rather, you should consider the various platforms on which your website will be viewed whenever you add content or improve functionality. It should become a standard for how you update your site, rather than a one-and-done process.