How to Optimise Your Website for Mobile: 5 Essential Tips for Marketers

Mobile optimization is the practice of making sure that visitors who access your website from mobile devices are presented with an experience optimized for their specific device.

Every year people spend a greater amount of time consuming content on their mobile handsets, however a high number of websites aren’t being upgraded to account for changes in screen sizes and load times.

Mobile optimization dives deep into website design, structure of web content, page load time and many other factors to ensure your website is doing it’s best to not put off customers from bouncing or abandoning the sales funnel.

If you use search marketing then you may already have optimised your website for the search engine. So when it comes to thinking about ‘mobile-first’ there are but a few extra things to strongly consider.

• In 2019, 4.4 billion people actively used the internet, with 3.5 billion spending time on social media platforms.
• It is estimated that over half of all video streaming derives from mobile.
• In the US, consumers can spend up to 90% of their mobile time using apps.
• Mobile internet usage had increased by 504% in daily media consumption since 2011.
• Over two-thirds (76%) of the US population open and respond to emails via mobile while watching TV.
• In July 2009 only 65,000 apps used to be available on the App Store. In 2019 there are 3.262 billion, 811 million of which are gaming apps.

Source: Statista

Due to connectivity and hardware issues, page speed is a more significant issue for mobile than desktop users. Typical painpoints for load time are oversized imagery and excessive use of Javascript. If your report highlights these errors, then centralise your fixes around compressing imagery, minifying code, leveraging browser caching, and limiting the number of redirects you have on your website. You can run a free page speed test using Google’s Lighthouse tool to see how you fare against core competitors.

Up until recently, some smartphones were not built with the technology to support each of these elements which forced webmasters to block them for ease of use. Things have changed since then and the mobile Googlebot insists on crawling these elements so it can see and interpret them from a technical perspective. In doing so, Google can understand if a website is deploying a responsive site or a different mobile solution. Run a test in Google Analytics to see if errors are being flagged and are a cause for concern.

Flash is a software platform that is not always made available depending on which type of handset the user is visiting your website from. If yo are considering using flash, try an alternative way of coding using HTML5 instead.

Pop-up ads are something of an obstruction to content rather than an incentive. They can be difficult to manage and close down on mobile devices. The likely outcome is that a consumer will bounce from a website link before even having chance to consume any meaningful content.

Search results lend themselves to a world of possibilities of structured data for mobile, enabling online businesses to highlight key attributes to entice the user to click through to the website. Common schema mark-ups to fast-track acquisition range from rich snippets to AMP pages but not all are necessary for every site on the web. Consider which pieces of structured data kit can make your website pop out from the rest of the results in SERPs, always having the end goal of the user in mind. For example, due to the limited screen space, a search result with rich snippets of 5-star reviews is even more likely to stand out than on a desktop.

It’s not longer desirable, but an essential method of marketing for webmasters to induct the contact information of their website and business in the Knowledge Graph panel. Google indexes these fragments of data so it can present users with results that best match their search queries based on the context of their search. If for example, a search for a local eatery is carried out your place of business may display in the local map pack if the steps of optimisation have been executed correctly. Failing to register such important data puts your business at risk of losing out on new customers and leads.

When configuring your website for mobile consider making it responsive, which means allowing it to fit to all device screen sizes with ease, otherwise working on a separate mobile site may be worth exploring.