You will probably be aware that your website should be optimized for mobile devices – you may have been told this by marketing people, or read it online, or simply absorbed the information as you begin to learn more about your business and how to run it. However, although you might know that it is important, do you know why? Knowing why will help you to determine exactly which route to take, and how much time and effort to spend on this area of your website.
The fact is, being optimized for mobile use means your site will rank better. Around 80 percent of the best-ranking sites have been made for mobile use as well as standard use. Add to that the fact that another 80 percent of all those using the internet do so via a smartphone, and you can see that without the right optimization, your website might be overlooked or fail entirely. Read on to find out how to give your website the mobile-friendly boost it needs to bring you more business in the future.
Use A Responsive Theme
If you need to make your website more mobile friendly quickly, installing a responsive theme, or having your web designers Bluelinemedia.co.uk do it for you, is going to be the first thing you need to do. This is ideal if you are just getting started, or if your site doesn’t have a lot of traffic coming to it right now. If you have a more well-established site, changing the theme can be risky, and it might cause some of your current customers to look elsewhere if they don’t enjoy it, so you will need to determine what is more important; taking care of your current sales or searching for new ones in a much larger pool.
A responsive theme is one that will render perfectly on all devices, from a laptop to a phone, no matter what size of screen you might be looking at. If you don’t use a responsive theme, although the site may look great on a computer, it could well be difficult to read or use on a smaller device.
Use Simple Menus
If you are creating a design that is just for a laptop, you can afford to have more complicated and in-depth menus. If, however, you want your business website to be more user-friendly, you are going to need to think carefully about making your menus very simple. If not, things can start to get rather complicated and difficult using a smaller screen, and for a visitor to a site to have to be scrolling through lots of different elements before finally reaching where they want to go is extremely off-putting.
Try to have very few choices when it comes to your menus, and ideally very few pages if possible (this can be harder for an online store, of course). When searching on a mobile device, most people are going to be in a hurry and simply want information or to make a quick purchase, so let them do this, and you will have much more business.
Include A Search Function
If you do have several pages on your site, or you have a lot of menu options that you don’t want to change because they work well on the laptop version of your website, a search function can be a good alternative.
By adding this option, visitors can bypass the complicated and potentially messy issues of the menu system and find what they want immediately. By incorporating this search into the web design but ensuring it is prominently displayed, you can encourage people to use it before they get frustrated and go elsewhere to spend their money.
