Nowadays, more than half the global population chooses small screens like mobile phones, androids, and iPads to connect. This makes it more important to create a mobile-optimized website, which can help you reach wider audience.  The mobile-first indexing method prefers the mobile version of your site over the desktop version, making it more critical than ever to create mobile-optimized websites. This blog will explore six essential steps for creating a mobile-optimized website.

6 Steps to Create a mobile-optimized Website: 

A website is considered mobile-friendly when designed, optimized, and developed to cater to users who access it via standard mobile devices. The following sections will discuss six fundamental steps to creating a mobile-optimized website.  

Choose a responsive design:

A responsive website will fit adequately regardless of screen size and convey the content, known as mobile-friendly website design. So select a responsive design framework like Bootstrap or Foundation if you are using custom coded website and responsive themes if you are using CMS built website. This can occur on mobile phones, iPads, tablets, or smartwatches.

• Responsive design uses a grid system that divides the websites into columns scaled at 100% of the browser’s width. This grid is fluid and adaptable, and its content can be adjusted and reorganized (move, stack, etc.) to adjust the screen size. So, it is important to streamline your website’s layout with the content. 
• CSS (Cascading style sheets) and Java scripts help Google analyze your website as an audience and index it properly for optimal search rankings. These languages minify the content. Therefore, avoid Adobe Flash, as it is not supported by Android or iOS. 
• Use short and scannable paragraphs, expressive and clear headings, subheadings, bullet points, and a Call to Action (CTA) to guide the users. Avoid zooming or horizontal scrolling. 
• Use scalable images. Remember this when resizing images properly to fit different screen sizes. Top digital market service providers try to ensure your site has a responsive design. 

Simplify navigation to increase accessibility

A mobile-optimized website is easy to navigate on small and big screens.

• Sticky navigation makes the website seem professional and organized. So, make your navigation accessible by using sticky headers and footers.
• Buttons and links must be large enough to be clicked by the finger. Touchscreen navigation can cause accidental clicks on links if they are too big or too small. In short, your site must have clickable elements. 
• Use a hamburger menu to optimize your website for mobile devices. It saves space and creates a clean look. The menu appears as three horizontal lines, like a hamburger, and when you click on it, the website’s navigation menu opens. 

Enhance mobile site speed:

Website loading speed is essential in deciding your user’s experience. Mobile users expect a smooth and quick experience. If they see that the site takes so much time to load, they will return, increasing the bounce rate. You can hire one of the best digital marketing agencies to ensure your site’s mobile speed is good or can enhance your mobile site speed by: 

• Use a CDN (Content delivery network) to minimize and compress the code. Despite delivering your files from a single central server, a CDN helps you keep your copies on geographically distributed computers. This helps deliver the content faster and serve it from a location close to the user. 
• Execute caching on your site, which stores some files on your user’s device. The site loads faster the next time it is accessed.
• Keep up with updated software for all aspects. Outdated software makes your site vulnerable and less efficient. So, keep your CMS, plugins, and themes updated to make your site efficient. 
• The images you insert in your website undoubtedly make it look more beautiful, but if they are large, they will decrease the page loading speed. So, you must compress these images with apps like Compressor, tiny PNG, WebP, and shortPixel as per image optimization in SEO techniques. 
• To speed up page loading time, reduce the number of components in the website and minimize the HTTP requests. You can use Google’s page speed insights tool, which will analyze your text, provide feedback, and suggest areas for improvement. 

Improve mobile SEO:

To create a mobile-optimized website, one must be updated on mobile SEO trends. You must follow famous sources and SEO professionals who can provide valuable insights. This will ultimately rank your sites in the search engines, especially on mobile searches. An online marketing company specializing in this work will provide the best results.

• You should test your site’s friendliness with mobile phones using Google’s mobile-friendly tool to check the usability standards. 
• AMP ( Accelerated mobile pages) in SEO helps you to create pages that load instantly. This allows visitors to engage with the website rather than bouncing to another website. 
• Use structured data, such as optimized meta tags and mobile-friendly content, to help search engines understand your content and provide better results.  These SEO tips and tricks are the basic implementation for and effective website. 

Use appropriate CTA size and location:

When creating a mobile-optimized website, use less precise text, shorter subject lines, and large CTA buttons suitable for mobile users to click and access to ensure a good experience. Therefore, the characteristics of an optimized website include: 

• CTAs must be large enough to easily tap them without zooming in. A minimum size of 44*44 is recommended. 
• You should place CTAs in easily accessible areas, such as at the end of the content sections or near the top of the page. 
• You should be precise about the links and provide adequate spacing to avoid accidental clicks. 

Test and repeat:

You must evaluate your site’s performance on different devices by simply using it on actual devices. You can also use various tools and methods, to check your site’s traffic with Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and mobile friendly test to point out any issues or errors that may affect your ranking. Remember to be updated with any change Google will make in analyzing your site with respect to mobile-first indexing. 

Why do we need a mobile-optimized website? 

A mobile-optimized website is needed to ensure various purposes, such as increased user experience, increased accessibility, and improved search visibility of your website. Let’s understand these points in detail: 

• Improve user experience: Creating a mobile or tablet optimized website will definitely enhance the user’s experience. Users are more interested in pages that load more efficiently on a phone or a laptop. Easy navigation comforts the customer, causing them to keep scrolling your website. When a user has a good experience, they will come back to your website, therefore improving customer retention rates. 
• Enhanced accessibility: A mobile-optimized website increases its accessibility through its responsive design, easy loading, and navigation, generating interest from users. The more accessible your website is to users, the more reach it has, and the more people will know about your existence. 
• Boost search visibility: A mobile-optimized website improves your search visibility on SERPs because of Google’s mobile-first indexing policy, which prioritizes a website with a responsive design. Hence, the more people see your website, the more the people scroll, and the more traffic to your website. 

Having a mobile optimised website is very important for this global online market as most of the people are using interet through mobile and androids. So, offering mobile-users a good experience of navigating and scrolling is our responsibility. Mobile site-speed optimization, responsive designs, CTAs size and possition, testing are component of mobile SEO. A mobile optimized website is not merely a convenience but essential for effectively reaching your target audience and constructing a solid online presence. .

Banyanbrain, a digital marketing firm, provides all types of digital marketing services, including SEO, to optimize your website and improve user experience. You can also contact Banyanbrain to develop an optimized website for your company. 

FAQs

1. What is a mobile-optimized website?

A mobile-optimized device is designed to provide a smooth user experience on all mobile devices. It adjusts font, layout, content, and images according to all screen sizes. 

2. How do you optimize a site for a phone?

To optimize the website for mobile, use responsive design, optimize images, increase speed with caching and CDN, enhance mobile SEO, and use structured data and clickable CTAs. 

3. How do you tell if a website is optimized for mobile?

A website will be optimized for mobile if it has a responsive design, fast load times, easy navigation, and clickable links. You can also use tools like Google’s mobile-friendly tests.

4. Is mobile optimization important for SEO?

Mobile optimization is essential for SEO because Google prioritizes mobile-optimized websites in search engine rankings. Google crawls the website with it’s mobile bot, therefore it becomes more important to make a responsive websites for mobile phones.

5. How can I optimize my mobile website speed?

To optimize mobile website speed, compress images, decrease HTTP requests, use CDN for quick delivery, enable caching, minify CSS and javascript, and implement lazy loading.