The latest stats show that more than 55% of all web traffic comes from mobile users. That means it’s more important than ever to develop a responsive web design that provides a great user experience for customers. But mobile optimization is complex, and there are lots of little things you can do to make sure your website provides the best user experience. As a leading SEO company Brisbane, we’ll go over our tips for how you can optimize your website for mobile while improving your Brisbane SEO at the same time.
We’re now living in a mobile-first world. More than 90% of people use smartphones to browse the internet, buy products, and keep up with their favorite brands. If your website isn’t ready for mobile users then you could be missing out on hundreds or thousands of potential customers.
If you want to reach those people then you need a responsive, mobile-friendly site. The best way to achieve that is to design for mobile from the very beginning. Building a website specifically for the mobile experience leads to a much better product, and it ensures every element works perfectly, both on a computer and on a smartphone.
When designing for mobile, there are three key things you need to think about:
You don’t need to be an experienced web developer to build a site that’s mobile-ready. These days, platforms like WordPress allow you to use themes, plugins, and other building tools that take care of the hard work.
When choosing a theme, make sure you’ve selected an option that puts mobile design first. Not every website theme focuses on mobile, and some of them neglect to include it altogether. We’d recommend trialing a few different themes to see what type of results you can achieve.
Likewise, if you’re adding features using plugins, make sure the plugin provides functionality without impacting the mobile experience. It’s also helpful to test your website on real mobile phones. While most website themes can display a simulated mobile screen, real-world performance may differ, so don’t forget to double-check all the features on an actual smartphone.
Sophisticated websites with great branding have become the norm. Your customers expect your website to be beautiful, and that often means using large images, videos, and other design elements.
The only issue is that these design elements often have large file sizes. The larger the file, the longer it takes to load. That’s bad for both user experience and SEO. We get around this issue by optimizing and compressing these large files and using formats like webp and webm. While you may lose a little bit of quality, the difference is almost impossible to spot on a mobile users screen, and the improvements in loading times more than make up the difference.
One of the big challenges with mobile-first design is the limitations that come with mobile network speeds. Your laptop might be able to load every webpage blindingly fast. However, mobile users are limited by the speed of the network, reception, and the number of users in the area.
This creates an issue for loading websites with lots of videos, images, and complex design elements. All those things help create a sophisticated design that stands out. But, they’re slow to load, and slow websites are never good for user experience or SEO. To get around this, many web designers use smart loading features like:
