Today, nearly everything we do, be it ordering food, hailing a cab, sharing photos on social media, posting on our blog, can be done through a smartphone. Many people now use their smartphone as their sole computer. So, website optimization for mobile is highly essential. Mobile traffic has been increasing year over year, and it surpassed desktop traffic back in 2016. A phone is more versatile and tends to provide more value to the user than a computer.
If your website isn’t mobile-optimized, you’re missing out. Google will not give your site a high ranking if your website is not mobile-friendly.
“Think Mobile-First when you start building a website”
7 Techniques to Optimize Your Website for Mobile Devices
Please take the time out to implement as many of the below mentioned methods as possible. This will help you improve the odds that your website performs well on all devices and is favored by Google’s mobile-first search engine index.
1. Test Your Site Using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Tool
Before making any move, it will be smart to see how your website performs currently when it comes to mobile friendliness. Using this technique will help you pinpoint the specific areas of your website that need special attention as you start improving your website.
Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool will show you if your site is up to Google’s standards for mobile pages. To test a website, you simply need to put in the website’s URL and select run test. The process usually completes within a few seconds and you will then be able to see the results.
If your site is mobile friendly, you will be able to see a message indicating just that. If it is not mobile friendly, then you will see the list of elements that need to be adjusted. Loading page problems might be faced even if the other problems are solved. The importance of website optimization for mobile would be seen at a number of position, so it is better to manage it straight away.
2. Use of Responsive WordPress Theme
When it comes to choosing a WordPress theme, you have an abundance of options to choose from. When choosing a theme for your website,the one thing one many other that you want to make sure is that you are using a responsive theme for your website. This ensures that your theme is well optimized for mobile devices and that it doesn’t negatively affect your website’s performance.
The theme you pick also needs to be secure and have options for customization so that you can tweak it just enough to get the perfect result that you desire, with an appealing look and a fresh style. Fortunately, most themes available these days are fully responsive and already come optimized for mobile. Make sure that you carefully check out the list of features of a theme before you install it.
Websites like themeforest.com let you filter themes according to their responsiveness, and it is a great way to go about finding a new theme for your website.
Website Optimization for mobile works on same themes. Rather these themes are well developed to be customized for devices.
3. Choose a Reliable Web Host
No amount of work on your side can stop your website from performing poorly if you don’t have a good, fast and secure hosting service
Picking a good and reliable hosting service plays a vital role in your website’s mobile friendliness. The best option to go with in this case is picking a VPS hosting plan as they are affordable while ensuring terrific performance at all times.
However, if you need the most out of your hosting service, you might want to go with a managed dedicated server. This lets you customize the server to your exact requirements while ensuring speed and security at the same time. Website optimization for mobile can actually generate long run benefits.
4. Improve Your Site’s Loading Times
As mentioned previously, website speeds are a particularly significant element when it comes to mobile optimization. Optimizing your site for speed will not only keep your bounce rates down to a minimum, but it will also ensure a good user experience in terms of site performance.
Not long ago, Google introduced it’s “Speed Update”. It made website speed a ranking factor for mobile pages. Simply put, these days you need to especially take in to account how well your site performs on mobile devices if you want it to be easily found in search engines.
Use google’s Mobile Speed Test tool to find out how well your site is performing. The tool will automatically access your website and test it for loading speed from a mobile device perspective. After the testing is complete it will also show you how well your site competes with other websites in terms of loading speeds. You can also then check the page for more detailed information on how to improve your website’s speed.
While it may seem like a lot of work, most of these techniques can be implemented using simple and free solutions that require little to no configuration on your part. This will result in your site performing considerably better on mobile devices and leave you with one less thing to worry about when it comes to search engine rankings and SEO.
5. Redesign Your Pop-Ups for Mobile Devices
While they are usually criticized, popups remain one of the
Even medium-size popups designed for a desktop site can become far more disruptive when viewing the website on mobile. Google recently implemented some pop-up penalties. It provides you with a set of rules that your website must follow in terms of popups. So that mobile users aren’t fed up or to avoid covering up too much of the site.
You’ll want to configure your popups as follows, if you want to adhere to Google’s provided guidelines:
• On mobile devices, popups should only cover a fraction of the screen and be as non-obstructive as possible.
• The Popups should have a decently sized button that is visible to mobile users. So that they can be closed easily.
• Additionally, the Pop-ups with necessary information are exempt. Such as login-dialogs, age verification forms or cookie notices.
6. Enable Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
Another step for website optimization for mobile is to use AMP. In simple terms, AMP is a method of stripping down your site of unnecessary elements from your website pages and serving these pages to users who access your website using a mobile device. It does so by removing unnecessary content, as well as unnecessary media files and advanced layouts.
While AMPs have a lot more to them than described above, you don’t necessarily have to worry about doing all that work yourself. You can use the AMP for WordPress plugin to get a proper introduction to AMPs.
The plugin will introduce you to the basics of AMPs and it will automatically generate AMP versions of your web pages. You can even change the pages’ appearance to have more control over how your website looks on mobile devices. This is website optimization for mobile.
7. Create a Mobile App
This step is not necessary, but it is surely
Creating a mobile app opens a lot more doors for you that a website can’t as effectively. For example, apps let you control and deal with your website subscriptions directly through your own interface. You can also use push notifications to grab users’ attention with an app whenever you post content or have news to share.
It is possible to code a mobile app from scratch if you know how to do so. A better and time saving option for you will be to use tools that convert your website into an app for you.
One such tool that is great for WordPress sites is AppPresser. It gives you an intuitive app builder interface that will be easy to use for you if you are familiar with WordPress usage.
Conclusion
The main point of this article is to let you know that we are now living in a mobile-first world. Majority of internet users now rely on mobile devices than desktops. Optimizing your website so that it performs well and is still easy to use on mobile devices is key. Website optimization for mobile can
