With Google Mobile-First Index going live in March (after a year and a half of experimentation and testing), the pressure is ON for webmasters to make their content and sites more mobile-friendly.
Designed to help mobile-friendly content perform better for mobile users, this measure started migrating sites that follow the best practices for mobile-first indexing. As a result of this, many webmasters are looking for ways to re-optimise their mobile engagement strategies to improve the browsing experience for mobile users.
Speed
A major part of making your site more mobile-friendly is by making sure that your site loads content quickly. After an announcement at the beginning of the year from Google that slow loading content may perform less well and would count as a ranking factor, webmasters have realised the importance of faster loading content on mobile page.
Page speed affects user experience and bounce rate on sites. This is something we’re all innately aware of – how many times have you exited a page because it took too long to load? In fact, a whopping 53{3eb5e81dc2dbd5243766a445dfd7203b99614852f30724c0fcd7c1e47478fab9} of us will leave a mobile site if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load – talk about impatient. Ensure that your website has a mobile-optimised web design as well as reducing server response time, this will help your site to load faster.
Content
Your content management system should be amended to ensure that you are providing designated content to mobile users. This, however, does not mean that you have to create separate content for mobile and desktop but rather that elements should be adapted to fit better with mobile usage. This includes the length of content and, contrary to popular opinion, the resolution of included images. Many will tell you to scale down images, however, consider social platforms such as Instagram which is viewed mostly on mobile devices.
Instagram includes high-resolution pictures, and with the high-definition screens that most smartphones now have, anything less than high-resolution will look blurry or pixelated. Also if you include videos in your site, consider using YouTube. With its already responsive embed code and the way that YouTube videos automatically adjust to the size of the device, you save time and effort making your videos mobile responsive.
Responsive Design
This one’s a biggy as it shapes the format in which users will look at your site. If you do not include a responsive design for mobile users, many users get bored of having to zoom and re-adjust their screens to view your site and read your content. This goes to the point that many mobile users give up and move onto the next site. To avoid this happening, ensure that your code or template is responsive, taking advantage of adjustable layouts and images. By implementing a responsive design, your site will be able to identify the size of the device and adapt.
Want to learn more about how you can make your site more mobile-friendly? Get in touch with us!
