Google is putting searchers in a box.

Starting in April 2015, Google began rolling out its mobile-friendly website update. More recently, in 2021, the company launched mobile-first indexing which means websites that are not mobile-friendly are likely to see lower search engine rankings and therefore, a lower share of mobile traffic. (source)

In other words, the mobile-friendly website update improves the user experience of web searchers on their smartphones by sorting mobile-friendly websites to the top and sifting poorly designed websites into oblivion.

What Does The Mobile-Friendly Site Update Mean For You?

The average person spends about 50 full days every year on their mobile devices, according to a report by eMarketer(source).  With mobile phone usage continuing to grow, it’s important that your website is mobile-optimized to ensure a positive user experience for smartphone users.

If your website is not mobile-optimized, it could be disastrous for your website’s search engine ranking, which means you will miss out on potential customers and revenue. Even though this development at Google has played out for over half a decade, many businesses still have not made the switch to a mobile-optimized website. If you’re one of those businesses, we’re here to help you fix that!

Here are five tips that will help you to optimize your website:

1. Audit Your Website’s Current Mobile-friendliness

When indexing your site into their search algorithm, Google runs a test on your website. You can run this test yourself by entering your website’s URL into Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool. This tool will test your website among a number of different criteria that may not be obvious to your naked eye and output a score of its mobile-friendliness.

Google’s lighthouse is another useful tool that will let you know if your website is blazing fast or lagging behind the competition. It will give insights into your website’s responsiveness, accessibility, and speed. Importantly, you can toggle between seeing results of the speed test when loaded on a desktop vs. a mobile device.

2. Make Sure Your Mobile Website Is Responsive

You may ask, “what is a responsive website?” It’s a website that adapts its content and design to the size of the device you’re using. Responsive web design means that your site is designed to look good on any device, from desktop to tablet to smartphone. 

To further understand how we get to a responsive web design, we have to first know how a website is constructed. What are the building blocks of a website? 

All websites are essentially made up of three things:

• HTML: The page’s content. Includes everything from text, images, video, and more.
• CSS: The way the page is styled. CSS dictates the colors, font styling, and spacing used.
• JavaScript: The things that make the page interactive. Javascript is usually responsible for animations, web forms, and other interactive components.

In a website designed for responsiveness, these elements resize and adjust according to the size of the browser viewport. If they don’t, you’re left with cut-off text and images or horizontal scroll bars.

Now that you understand how a responsive website is constructed and what characteristics make it responsive, you’re probably wondering what benefits a responsive website offers.

• You only have to design and develop one website that can be used across multiple devices, instead of designing a site for each device size. Ultimately that means less time spent on design and development and more time spent on improving your business.
• It’s easier to update and maintain because again, it’s only one website.
• Your website will look modern, up-to-date, and user-friendly, which Google loves!

3. Make Sure Your Mobile-Optimized Site Is Fast

Mobile devices suffer the most from slow-loading websites. Because of this modern search engines use site speed as a highly critical ranking factor in their search result algorithm. It’s not just the time it takes to load a page, but also how quickly that page responds to user input. If your website is slow it will be penalized by search engines(source). 

According to Google, nearly half of users will abandon a mobile site if it takes longer than three seconds to load(source). In fact, in the first 5 seconds, website conversion rates drop by an average of 4.42% with each additional second of load time(source).

You will need to work with a professional web developer to create a fast and functional website. They will optimize your website according to industry standards.

They can do this by:

• Optimizing all images.
• Reducing the number of files needed to load a page.
• Compressing files to reduce their size.
• Minimizing the number of redirects
• Minimizing render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content.
• Optimizing third-party calls.

If you understood all that jargon above, congratulations, you’ll probably be able to optimize the website on your own. If you didn’t understand all the points above, don’t worry, it just means you’d be better off hiring a professional web developer who can easily complete the work for you.

4. Make Your Mobile-Optimized Site More Accessible

Google is striving to make its search results more legible for mobile users. To that end, the company has tested hundreds of sites to find common mobile usability issues.

For example, Google found that many websites use fonts that are too small to read, placing the burden on users to pinch and zoom in to read the content. It also found that many sites use text that is too close to other elements on the page(source). This makes it difficult to read without zooming out or challenging to see where one element ends and the next begins.

If you’re designing your own website or about to work with a web designer, you’ll want to insist on using mobile-friendly design patterns such as:

• Avoid overly complicated navigation.
• Minimizing the number of clicks to get to the content.
• Using text that is optimized for each device size and large enough to read without zooming.
• Ensuring legibility by optimizing the font size, color, and contrast of your text.
• Using header tags to construct a proper page hierarchy, but also to be compatible with screen readers.

The accessibility and usability of your website are important for your business. Your site’s accessibility is not only beneficial for your users, but it also plays a key role in your site’s ranking in search algorithms.

Beyond that, there’s a very real legal aspect of having an accessibly compliant website. If your website is deemed non-compliant by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) standards, your business could receive a lawsuit by your site’s users or by a bad actor who finds non-compliant sites and sues companies for a living. 

As cumbersome and time-consuming as it is to keep on top of accessibility and usability standards, it’s absolutely necessary to keep your business in good standing. 

5. Test Your New Mobile-Optimized Website 

After ensuring your website is mobile-friendly, test it on various mobile devices and under different conditions. Factors to test for include:

• Navigation: Test if your website is easy to use and navigate from page to page.

• Usability: Check if all the features on your website are working properly for all users.
• Appearance: Confirm that your website looks good and text is legible on all devices.

If your website does not pass your tests and it does not work smoothly and efficiently on mobile devices, it will decrease user experience and it may also rank lower in search results. 

If you’re unsure about how to begin testing your website, you can invest in hiring a testing company. While expensive, it can have a huge return on investment when you discover the benefits of a high-quality mobile-friendly website.

If you’re looking for a low-cost Do-It-Yourself solution, you can try your luck at testing platforms such as BrowserStack or SauceLabs. With just a bit of a learning curve, you can use these platforms to test your website or Web App using different browsers, operating systems, and device types.

Wrapping Up

Creating a mobile-friendly website is essential to ensure a positive experience for your customers. If your website is not mobile-friendly, you could be missing out on revenue.

While it may be tempting to go for a low-hanging fruit solution, such as buying a mobile-friendly theme or using a website builder, these options are mediocre at best. 

Avoid mediocrity, stress, and the high expenses of hiring and managing a team of professionals, if you need a mobile-friendly site, Opasite can help. At our website design agency, you can expect mobile-optimized websites every time. We produce 100% mobile-optimized websites.

Opasite Web Design offers website design packages that are built specifically for service-based businesses. These packages come complete with a fully designed website (mobile-optimized of course), content writing, search engine optimization, ongoing maintenance, management, and technical support. All of this for prices starting as low as $99/mo!

With Opasite you can be sure that your website is in good hands, our professional team has developed thousands of websites just like yours. Don’t wait any longer, contact us today! Our web designers can help you take your business to the next level with a mobile-optimized website.