What is mobile responsiveness?
For most websites, the majority of traffic today comes from mobile and tablet devices. While most new websites dynamically support smaller screens, there’s more to consider to ensure a great experience for all users. We covered some of these things in the performance section, as these two categories are closely related, but I’ll go into more specifics about mobile experiences here.
It’s important to ensure that your website experience on mobile doesn’t differ too dramatically from desktop, as missing out on crucial information can harm conversions.
Most contemporary web builds take mobile responsiveness into consideration, so talk to your web designer, developer or host if you find any gaps in mobile responsiveness from your Digital Ready Check Up Report.
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Set a viewport tag to optimise for mobile screens
The viewport is the visible area of a page, and smaller screen sizes will have fewer pixels available for showing content. To cater for this, mobile responsive websites adjust and simplify components of a website to look better on smaller screens.
This is important, as non-responsive websites can make text hard to read and links hard to click as they shrink to fit the screen. In order for a website to adapt to different screen sizes, a viewport tag is inserted in the code so that display instructions can be sent to the browser.
To make our lives easier, most modern template websites and CMS themes have this functionality built in already, so no action should be required. If you have an older or custom website that does not adjust to different screen sizes, get in touch with your web designer or developer to talk about how you can make your website mobile responsive.
Page load is too slow on 3G mobile connections
Ensuring that your website loads quickly on a 3G connection is a safe bet that your website will be performant for most people on mobile connections. Even though 3G is not the most up-to-date network for some areas, people will experience the equivalent of these speeds on average.
Taking a look at the performance section above is a good first step to lower your page load times. Get in touch with a digital coach or your web developer to look at more in-depth changes based on your website specifications.
Add mobile responsive techniques to ensure good user experience on different screen sizes
Utilising mobile responsive techniques will help to refine your design and brand appearance for different screen sizes. These techniques can include:
- Adapting the visual design for different screen sizes;
- Ensuring images + code are well optimised for fast page loading;
- Preventing information overload by avoiding pages and pages of complex information – which is even harder to navigate through on small screens;
- Considering where and when your audience interacts with your brand, and catering the website design for this.
A good place to start is booking in a free two hour session one of our digital coaches to determine where you can make the most impact. Your web designer or developer will also be able to provide you with a range of different actions you can take to ensure your website provides users with a great experience – allowing you to convert eyeballs to sales.
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