A crucial part of marketing is not only knowing where, but how, your target audience will find your message. Today, the “how” is different from just a decade ago. Many people now connect to the Web via phones, tablets and even watches rather than desktops. As such, optimizing your business’ site for mobile is not only smart, but necessary.
So, what elements, specifically, should be incorporated—and which discarded—when optimizing a website for mobile devices? To help you decide on the best strategy, we asked members of Forbes Technology Council to share their top tips for building mobile-friendly websites.
1. Make It Really Fast
Mobile connections are slow, and users want an instantaneous experience. Run your site through a tool like Google’s PageSpeed to get a checklist of everything needed to make it fast. This can give you a quick win and immediately impact things like search engine optimization (SEO) and bounce rates. However, you’ll need a mobile-first culture to remain competitive and give your users great experiences. – Nicholas Thompson, Garnish
2. Use It Yourself On Mobile
If you don’t use your site on mobile then you’re not going to have a good site. Spend a portion of a day in the field and try to use your site to do what your users do. It can be painful, but you are experiencing what your users are seeing and doing. This is invaluable. I have stopped using a handful of sites on mobile because they are too limiting—and these are tech sites! – Tom Altman, Leverage, powered by Clickstop
3. Keep It Simple
Keep it super simple! The landing page should be extremely short, with easy links to the main content the user is looking for. Your main page should have a few big-picture ideas with a link that delivers the user to the core content they are looking for. The main page needs to be streamlined for quick navigation and easy for mobile users to navigate, without crazy formatting and too many words. – Daniel Schwartz, Design I.T. Solutions LLC
4. Leverage Media Over Text
Leverage engaging media, images and videos over text on mobile devices to trigger an initial interest. In addition, allow people to contact you easily via chat or a simple sign-up form. Convenience is key on mobile, and it doesn’t have to provide the full-fledged experience of a website that’s looked at on a PC, but trigger initial interest so that people want to know more. – Eric Trabold, Nexkey, Inc.
5. Focus On Accessibility
The best advice is to keep the data simple and easy to access. As the real estate gets smaller (as on watches), you want to make the data easily readable and accessible. Additionally, make it easy for the user to access and prioritize what data they want to see. – Anna Frazzetto, Harvey Nash
6. Consider Cross-Browser, Cross-Device Compatibility
Per a 2018 Statista report, 47.2% of all internet traffic comes from mobile users. These users tend to spend twice as many minutes online as desktop users. Websites should be mobile-optimized to meet the needs of our mobile-first world. Emulators and testing tools like BrowserStack or SmartBear can ensure that the mobile Web experience is robust across browsers, operating systems and devices. – Apurva “Apu” Kumar, LotaData, Inc.
7. Seek Feedback From Customers
Test and use the mobile version like a customer would by getting them involved. See what they like and don’t like about your mobile version and make changes that reflect how the mobile version is most used. Customers like explaining how they use these mobile sites, so there is a wealth of information readily available to create what works. – Jon Bradshaw, Calendar
8. Focus On What Matters The Most
When you have less space to play around with it becomes even more important to figure out the main purpose of a webpage and focus more on that part. A basic example would be the product page of an e-commerce website. The main purpose of this page is to provide more info and sell it. The “Buy” button should be prominent here. Knowing if pictures give more info or words do will help you decide the size of pictures versus text. – Vikram Joshi, pulsd
9. Incentivize Developers To Create Secure Mobile Sites
We all want our mobile sites to be fast, intuitive and useful with a great user experience. We incentivize developers to hit these goals. We rarely incentivize developers to make security a goal. The same privacy and security issues that cause problems for traditional sites are also applicable to mobile sites. Developers need to be incentivized and measured on creating secure sites. – Brian Contos, Verodin Inc.
10. Create A Responsive Cross-Platform Site
Ensure you create a responsive website that runs on all mobile operating systems (iOS/Android/Windows) we well as on tablets. Then supporting it for desktop is a much easier job to do. – Sachin Deshpande, Qualitas IT Private Limited
11. Use Content Delivery Networks
By employing a Content Delivery Network (CDN), you can put your content physically closer to the end user’s mobile device, which will speed up load times in a big way. CDNs will also take heat off your origin servers, which can save money on compute cycles, since CDNs cache content and requests. Mobile devices connect slower, which can slow down other users; CDNs mitigate that as well. – Rick Conlee, Meticulosity
12. Don’t Forget Your Thumb
First and foremost, understand your customer. If they are mobile-first, begin with the most confined mobile designs first, then move to tablet and desktop. Second, ensure the content will load within two to three seconds and can be easily navigated using just a thumb. And third, ensure your call-to-action can be executed in less than 30 seconds. – Brett Jurgens, Notion
13. Empathize With Your Users
A mobile site is not only a different form factor; it’s a different use case and a different state of mind. Answer the hard questions: What users will be using your site on mobile? What job do they want to get done? What do they feel as they are using your website? Only when you have answers to the above should you begin working on your mobile site/app. Then test, iterate, survey, test, iterate, etc. – Micha Breakstone, Chorus.ai