7 Must-Do’s When Optimizing Your Site for Mobile Users
“Mobile is not the future, it is the now. Meet your customers in the environment of their choice, not where it’s convenient for you.”
—Cyndie Shaffstall, Spider Trainers
Americans just can’t get enough with their mobile devices. They spend an average 158 minutes everyday on their smart phones and tablets. By 2015, mobile marketing in the U.S. will generate $400 billion compare to $139 billion in 2012. What’s more, new Google research says that 50% of mobile users are most likely to visit after conducting a local search, while 34% of consumers on computers will go to a store. And these mobile users are ready to buy once they are in a store.
“If your plans don’t include mobile, your plans are not finished.”
—Wendy Clark, Coca-Cola
Now who doesn’t want a mobile optimized site? Plus, optimizing your site for mobile users is not rocket science. It’s as simple as pie. Today, we are going to take a look at 7 must-do’s for marketers or small business owners to optimize websites for mobile users.
#1: Be Careful with Your Content
With an average 4.86-inch screen size, it’s unwise to show users all the content you have on your main site. Simplify, simplify, and simplify! To display well on mobile, you need simple page designs, large font size, critical information placed above the fold, and comfortable and touchable buttons for fat fingers. As we mentioned before, mobile devices convert much better in local search. It’s truly important to put your contact information, location and a link to a map on your mobile site.
We are not saying that local search means everything to mobile, the key information about your products or services is also necessary. A high quality picture, simple and clear descriptions, customer reviews and an “Add to cart” button are all you need. Just like what you did for your main site, but make everything mobile. Let’s make the picture smaller and font size bigger!
#2: Plan Your Layout
Most of the time, you need to design a different layout for your mobile site to make it as streamlined as possible. Remember, mobile sites usually load slower than traditional web sites, and people may don’t have enough patient to go deeply on your site. (We will talk about the loading speed later on this blog) The best way to design your mobile site is to think as your mobile users. To keep gathering everything they may need, and organizing them into a streamlined format. By doing so, your users will have the best experience on your site.
Also, you’d better maintain a consistent style on both your main site and your mobile site. Don’t change the color, logo or any other branding elements. Mobile site is an important touchpoint and should promote your brand as well. Besides, the least thing you want to do is letting your main site users feel odd when they are shifting to the mobile site.
#3: Use Your CMS
Now you all know how to improve your mobile site, but how to build it if we don’t have an existing mobile site right now? For large business, you can just hire some engineers to write down the code. For small business, don’t worry, many companies offer automatic systems to build mobile sites.
WordPress does an amazing job of mobile optimization. By simply choosing a mobile theme, you will get everything settled for your mobile site. WordPress offers their users plenty of themes, Metro is one of their best sellers. This mobile theme allows you to display your site across a variety of mobile devices. All you need to do is clicking the right button. WordPress can also make your site responsive by offering responsive themes. No rush, we will talk about this later.
#4: Use A Preview Tool to Check Your Site
When I was working on the responsive design of our email templates, we used Litmus, an email preview tool, to check if our new templates work for every platform. And you can do the same thing for your mobile sites. Emulator tools such as Mobile Phone Emulator and MobiReady will help you test your site across different platforms.
Mobile Phone Emulator supports most of the mainstream platforms including iPhone, iPad, Samsung, and HTC. It provides users a full experience of the websites that you are testing. Everything is exact the same as you site is displaying on real mobile devices, which means you can click the page or items to check every part of your site.
MobiReady helps you check many parameters such as dotMobi compliance and W3C mobile compliance. It generates detailed error reports and checks the comprehensive code for users.
#5: Make Sure You Have a Fast Loading Speed
Keynote’s report in 2012 shows that 64% of smartphone users expect sites to load in 4 seconds or less, while the average website takes more than twice that time. As you may already know, consumers have no patient with a slow loading website. So, reducing the loading time has became one of the key issues for mobile optimization.
It does need a little more coding technique on this part. The rule is simple: get rid off everything that is not part of your core concept.
Three tactics:
- Reduce the number of HTTP requests required to fetch the resources for each page.
- Reduce the size of the payload needed to fulfill each request.
- Optimize client-side processing priorities.
(Want to learn more about coding? Click HERE!)
#6: Don’t Forget to Track Your Mobile Site
Here we are talking about the Google Analytics, though there are tons of amazing analytics tools that can help you evaluate your performance, you just can’t do SEO without Google.
Tracking your mobile site on Google Analytics is no different from tracking your traditional website. You just need to paste Google’s server-side code snippets on each page you wish to track. Then you are all set! Next, you can start to read the new mobile report on your Google Analytics account today.
#7: If possible, make your site responsive
The mobile site development path looks like this: Mobile Friendly Website → Mobile Optimization Website → Responsive Design Website.
Responsive design is a method of developing a site that is completely flexible regardless of device. There is no doubt that responsive design allows your visitors to have better user experience than mobile optimization sites. However, it’s not easy to do.
As we mentioned before, WordPress provides fully responsive themes such as Responsive Portfolio WordPress Theme for you to make your site responsive. But these themes are not customized for you. It will be better if you have someone developers to build your responsive site. If you have extra money, responsive design is definitely the right thing to do. All in all, user first is always the rule of thumb, right?
Mobile sites are a new area for many marketers. Designing and building them can be challenging. However, considering all the benefits a mobile site will bring to you in the future, it’s worth it.
This post is part of Inbound Marketing Clinic, a research project at NYU SPS
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