Would you put yourself in danger for the sake of your phone?
Nearly 30% of those under 30 say they would endanger themselves in order to avoid losing or damaging their phone.
This statistic makes me shake my head.
But then I grew up with a phone firmly attached to the wall. And all you could do on a phone was talk.
Now phones are used for texting, playing games, wasting time, researching info, buying stuff, and even talking.
So if your website isn’t mobile-friendly, you lose money.
Although making a website mobile-friendly involves layout and coding, these days that’s easy with most website builders.
And the payoff is huge:
As you can see from the statistic above, if you don’t optimize your website for a good mobile user experience, you lose almost half of your potential buyers!
12 UX Tips to Optimize Your Website for Mobile:
- Responsive Design: This feature is pretty standard with most website programs. You create your site, and then press the “responsive” button to see how it looks on a phone or a tablet. You can resize text, rearrange graphics, make elements viewable only on a phone, etc.
- Readable Text: A buyer should be able to easily read text, product descriptions, and shipping/return policies without zooming in. This means the text needs to be a good size and have adequate space between lines, buttons, and graphics.
- Vertical Orientation. In other words, your audience shouldn’t have to turn their phones horizontally to read your content. Using responsive design makes this possible as most computers are wider than than they are tall.
- Easy Links and Buttons: On a touchscreen, small buttons can be tricky to press. Make sure all clickable elements, like buttons and links, are large enough and spaced far enough apart to be easily tapped.
- Mobile-Friendly Menus: Traditional desktop menus often don’t work well on mobile devices. Consider using a hamburger menu or other mobile-friendly design that makes navigation easy on smaller screens.
- Search Icon Visible: Make sure it’s easy to search your entire site. The top right corner of most pages is a great place to put the magnify glass.
- Modify Popups: When someone first lands on your site they don’t want something to block their view a few seconds later. This distracts the user, can cause interaction issues, and increases bounce rates.
- Easy-to-Fill Forms: Filling out a form (such as a shipping address, etc.) on a phone or tablet can be difficult. Providing the correct fields (through easy HTML5) helps users enter information correctly.
- Optimize Images: Large, high-resolution images can slow down your site on phones and tablets. Be sure to optimize your images for mobile to ensure they load quickly.
- Fast Load Times: Slow-loading websites are a major cause of high bounce rates, especially on mobile devices. A site that comes up quickly encourages users to interact with the site instead of bounce somewhere else.
- Use Dark Mode. Using dark mode (black background/white text) has been shown to increase conversions on mobile.
- Test Your Mobile Site: Ensure you site looks good on desktop, ipads, and mobile phones. Google Search Console has a mobile-friendly test.
Cell Phone Usage is on the Rise
With more people becoming seriously attached to their phones, if you don’t have your site optimized for mobile, your audience won’t find you, much less make a purchase.
So it might seem like a hassle, but it’s a hassle that’s worth it.
Need to work on your webpages before you optimize your site on mobile? Read UX Tips for Webpages.
And if you need help giving your customers a better experience – on your website or by optimizing your mobile site – contact me.
