How To Make Sure Your Website Is Optimized For Mobile And Why It's Important - Android

It was always inevitable that connections to the internet using mobile devices would overtake desktop or laptop connectivity. In fact, close to 60% of today’s internet traffic comes from smartphones and tablets. What does this mean for your business? For one thing, it means that your website has to provide an engaging user experience for [...]

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The post How To Make Sure Your Website Is Optimized For Mobile And Why It's Important appeared first on Android Headlines.

It was always inevitable that connections to the internet using mobile devices would overtake desktop or laptop connectivity. In fact, close to 60% of today’s internet traffic comes from smartphones and tablets.

What does this mean for your business? For one thing, it means that your website has to provide an engaging user experience for visitors using mobile devices. If your website is hard to navigate, full of clutter, and looks out of place on small screens, site visitors will probably bounce off your site and over to a competitor that offers a seamless mobile web browsing experience.

The result is a higher bounce rate on your website and a lower conversion rate for your business. If you’re happy taking a hit to your bottom line, then carry on as you are. Of course, if you want to continue to enjoy growth as a business, you will have to make some changes to your website!

Why Mobile Optimization is Important

If you have a physical store, do you make it difficult for certain visitors to find what they are looking for? Do you block the entrance so it takes them a long time to get in, and then put obstacles down the aisles so it becomes difficult for them to get around? Do you hide your products and services amongst a ton of clutter?

No? By having a website poorly optimized for mobile visitors, this is exactly the experience they get. It might take a long time to connect to your website, pages may take a long time to load, and getting around using a small screen is a pain in the proverbial.

Whether you offer services, products, or provide a resource, if your visitors have a bad experience trying to view the content on your website using their mobile devices, there is a good chance they will bounce to a competitor that provides the opposite.

Google Rewards Mobile Optimized Websites

If your website lacks mobile optimization, it is a double-edged sword. This is because Google also gives preference to websites that deliver a good user experience. A mobile-friendly website will generally rank higher in Google’s search engine ranking positions. In fact, Google now uses mobile-first indexing, which means it will look at the mobile version of your website before it looks at your desktop version. The search engine understands that more people use mobile devices when going online, so it will order their rankings to suit those users.
The good news is that once you do optimize your website for mobile, you should experience better rankings in the Google search engine.

How to Optimize Your Website

While you can change your current website so that it will improve the experience for mobile visitors, Your best bet is to use a responsive website design. A responsive website will automatically detect the device, screen size and specifications of a device connecting to it before delivering the content in the best fit possible.

This could get expensive if you want to wipe the slate clean and design a whole new website using a responsive website design. Fortunately, there is a way you can do this on a lower budget. Platforms such as the Editor X responsive website builder provide you with tons of website templates already mobile optimized thanks to using responsive website design.

Optimize Your Pages to Ensure Fast Load Times

Be aware that using responsive web design alone is not a guarantee that mobile users have a positive experience when visiting your website. You still need to optimize your site to eliminate common mobile website problems. One of the most common issues webmasters face is pages loading slow on mobile devices.

As a species, we can be impatient – especially in modern times whereby everything is expected instantly. If your pages take longer than a few seconds to load, it would surprise you at how many visitors will abandon them. The answer? Just over half of them.

To combat slow load times, compress content such as images and videos, reduce the number of redirects, and remove any extraneous code.

Wrapping Up

With mobile devices now accounting for over 50% of all internet traffic, it is clear that any website hoping for success will need a mobile website. That number is only going to grow too, so this is not something you can put off for too much longer. Besides, once you switch to a responsive design, you should instantly notice tangible results. Bounce rates will decrease and your all-important conversion rates will start to climb.

Remember, setting up a responsive website does not have to be expensive. You can use website builders to create your own designs or choose from customizable templates. Each of these already uses mobile-responsive technology.

The post How To Make Sure Your Website Is Optimized For Mobile And Why It's Important appeared first on Android Headlines.