In 2019, more than 50% of traffic came from mobile phones. This is expected to still rise especially during the pandemic period. If you want to enter this market, consider improving your mobile site to gain more users, and increase traffic.
The first step would be to choose your web design approach. Ensure that your website is mobile-friendly so you get more engagements and conversions. Always follow Responsive Web Design – which means that your website should be compatible with multiple types of screens.
After choosing an approach, you may consider having either a Website Builder or Content Management System (like WordPress) for publishing your content across all devices.
For mobile, consider going for a fast hosting provider like Hostinger International Ltd to maximize the page loads and minimize other website problems, and opt for advanced CDN providers like Cloudflare.
Below, we have discussed a few problems that website owners face when launching a mobile site. We have also provided some tips on how to resolve these problems to help you create a responsive and faster website.
Problem 1: Mobile Website Doesn’t Work on Mobile
When your website simply does not work on mobile devices, this only means one thing: It is not mobile responsive which means that your website isn’t designed to fit on different screen sizes.
SEO-wise, you need to make sure that a mobile website can resize to multiple devices or your conversions will suffer a lot.
Before designing the website, keep multiple devices in mind, not just desktop computers. Do make sure that when you design content and layout, it can also be scaled down to smaller sizes. Making your website optimized on multiple devices ensures success. Be consistent so users can view content conveniently across multiple devices.
What you can do is make sure that you set the div widths to about 100 percent. Your website should be responsive so long as your images and text are set to responsive units.
Some tips to help you achieve a good responsive design for your mobile site:
- Make sure that text can be read on all devices
- Publish the same content for all devices
- Ensure that all your content is visible in all conditions especially in broad daylight
Problem 2: Slow Pages
Beginner website owners who run a business online must really work towards improving the page load times. Why?
You will hurt conversion rates if your pages don’t hit the 3-second benchmark. Try to take advantage of Google’s PageSpeed Insights so you have an idea of how your pages are doing and how to optimize it for maximum speed.
The majority of the websites have this problem. This is a major issue because load times are one of the ranking factors for mobile search engine ranking performance. If you want to rank high, improve your load times. Your marketing strategy might not work if your mobile website is so slow.
Tips for Improving Load Times:
- Try to compress all of your images
- Use only clean codes and make sure that you use the latest versions of that code
- Minimize the server requests and the use of plugins as much as possible
- Do not use too many web fonts and the use of JavaScript
Problem 3: Poor Mobile Navigations for the User
If there is one section of the website that is extremely important, that would be the Menu. When they are transferred to the mobile site, it is likely that the user will scroll through a vertical menu trying to look for the exact page that is found on a desktop.
If you only include the top-level pages on your mobile site, you may be able to keep the users on the page. However, they might miss out on the important information found on the lower level pages.
To improve user navigation, take advantage of the Hamburger Design. This has been a practice for most websites especially those sites with responsive designs.
The only downside for using this design is it will hide the navigation menu from your users. There are other alternatives to fixing that such as the tap bars but they also have disadvantages.
It can be difficult to optimize large navigation for mobiles and tablets. What you can do is to try creating a simpler menu that has only the primary pages. You may add some elements to these primary pages so users will have access to other relevant info on your site.
Problem 4: Clickable Elements Not Touch-Optimized
Keep in mind that the touch gestures are what will make your users really interact with your website. Your web forms, media players, menus, and other buttons must be optimized for touch to convert potential customers.
If space is smaller, ensure that you do not squeeze in too many touch elements as people may just end up hitting the wrong button. It’s important that the users are still able to read the content when they see a pop up on the screen.
Some tips:
- Make sure that other page elements do not block the touch elements
- Minimize the number of clicks
- Get rid of mouse-hover interactions
- Clickable elements should be large enough
- Optimize typing for form fields
Problem 5: Can’t View Page Content Right Away
Getting your website to scale correctly on mobile devices is one of the many challenges of a beginning website owner. If you do not improve this, chances are you will lose potential customers. However, scaling isn’t enough. You need to also make sure that they get to the right page content right away. They shouldn’t do endless scrolling of pages.
To correct this, you must also reduce your page load times. You need to make sure that the primary content is seen on the page when it loads. Avoid the use of popups as they can block the content. Also, you need to optimize your title size so content is more visible.
Wrapping Up
While it’s important to work on the designs, codes, and layouts of your mobile site, it is also important that you use the best hosting provider for your mobile site. Good hosting providers can incredibly improve page load times.