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A mobile-friendly website is the one that responds well to every size of the screen. Your website fits into every screen perfectly including tablets, phones (of all sizes), laptops and other screens.
Figures show that a website that is mobile friendly happens to get a high traffic.
You would be surprised to know that around 40% of the Internet crowd will turn down to a competitor’s site after a bad mobile experience. With the rise in smartphone users, the mobile search queries have increased by about 5 times. For the eCommerce sector, it has now become mandatory to make your website mobile friendly as it increases sales by about 50%.
Mobile Responsive VS Mobile-Friendly
Mobile responsive website adjusts its layout according to the screen size. The website can do down from a three column layout to a one column layout depending on the size of the screen. Whereas a mobile-friendly website works exactly the same across all the devices, restricting the features like navigation drop-down and flash.
To check whether the website is responsive or not you can simply reduce down the size of your browser’s window. If the website adjusts its size then it happens to be responsive. Thus it is important to be responsive while being friendly, this may help you convert more sale than ever!
So, all you need is to make your website mobile friendly!
Why a mobile-friendly website design necessary?
Before actually making your website mobile friendly you need to understand the necessity, its importance and how will it actually help with your sales.
1. Rise in Traffic and Conversions
There are of about 4.68 billion mobile users in the world. This is a huge number, giving a good mobile experience to such a large customer base will definitely attract customers.
Out of this India and China alone have around 1 Billion mobile subscribers and this will continue to grow. Users now tend to use their mobile device even while traveling and even at work. Moreover, Google has such intelligent algorithms that it recognizes a mobile-friendly website and is less likely to show up the mobile sites that are not responsive in the search results.
This leaves you behind your competition thus, in the end, you struggle to bring up traffic to your website and lead to more conversions. Thus, you need to make your website mobile friendly and get on the top of search results and increase your sales. A mobile-friendly design also improves your search engine ranking.
2. Better User Experience
If your website is not responsive enough then people are not going to enjoy scrolling down your website.
It is just a matter of 3 seconds that a user will like your website or not. To make a user stick your website, work on the user experience. Your website is to be accessed by all kind of users smartphone to a desktop, thus to improve visibility you need to have a better customer experience.
A good user experience will help you increase the SEO ranking of your website, ultimately more traffic and higher conversion rates.
3. Reduce Bounce Rates
Bounce rate is the average time a user spends on your website. If it does not find your websites appealing enough then they are likely to leave your website without doing any activity.
A mobile-friendly website design will keep your customers stick to your website for a longer time and thus reducing down the bounce rates on your website.
After knowing what is exactly is a mobile-friendly website and why is it necessary, late a look at the guide to understand how with simple tactics you can make your website mobile friendly.
How To Make Your Website Mobile Friendly?
1. Don’t Make Separate Website
Create a mobile version of your website rather than creating a whole new one. What developers do is cut short the content of the original website that is suitable for the mobile website and designs the website.
Instead of looking at what the users want more or deciding which content suits better the mobile website, keep the content similar. Organize your content such that it looks same in the desktop and mobile version. Google automatically rejects the two websites with similar content- on for the desktop and other for the mobile. So make one website rather than having separate designs.
The design experts recommend to first create a web page that loads well in the mobile and then convert into desktop version.
2. Use Responsive Design
A responsive design is already friendly with every screen size. A responsive theme will reduce down the number of work developers need to do to make your website mobile friendly.
The design is flexible, with CSS queries and adjusts itself with the screen size and orientation. There are a lot of pre-made themes available on the web that are responsive and take less time to integrate.
Some of the highly recommended websites for good responsive website themes are-
2.1 WordPress Themes:
Elegant Themes- From Elegant themes get 87 themes for just $89 / year. This is the first choice for all who are looking up to create multiple sites. Elegant themes have some amazing features like ePanel Theme Options, shortcodes, lifetime supports, regular updates etc.
Studio Press- Over 2 Lakhs of website trust StudioPress. It is best known for its Genesis Framework which is available at $59.99 with a child theme and $99 with a premium theme.
Thrive Themes- Just invest $19/month for 12 months and get access all the premium Thrive Themes and the plugins that they have created. A simple WordPress theme will cost you around $49 with a site license.
My Theme Shop- Get access to all the beautifully designed WordPress themes. Be a member with $19/month and get access to all My Theme Shop products or by any single theme for $45.
ThemeForest- Name a category and you will find 100s of themes related to it. You get to choose from more than 11 Thousand themes to start your website. The WordPress theme website offers you the most beautiful and amazing templates and is one of the most popular CMS.
2.2 Non-WordPress Themes
Squarespace- It is one of the best mobile design solutions and offers services at only $8/month.
Wix- it is an online website builder giving services at only $17 a month with the lot of themes to choose from. Choose a theme, customize it your way and you are ready!
ThemeJungle- It is a subsidiary of its online store builder- BuildaBazaar. All the themes available on ThemeJungle are free but to get access you need to sign up to BuildaBazaar with a plan. The plans start at $15 per month.
3. Use Standard Fonts and Font Size
Mobile devices might not have a lot of fonts installed, and any mobile user will hesitate to download a new font and switch to your competitor site.
It will be a good move if you use the pre-installed fonts on your website. Some fonts get easily fit into the screen while some are hard to. Along with the right fond keep up the size at least 14px. This makes it easier for you to zoom, read content and adjust accordingly.
4. Avoid Flash
Mobile devices do not support Flash, thus most of the websites now don’t rely much on flash. If you use flash in your website then it is less likely to work on any mobile device.
You can replace Flash with any other technology, use HTML instead.
5. Code In Bootstrap
It will much easier for the developer to work on a framework rather than building each piece of your website- a framework takes down a lot of headaches down. One such framework is Bootstrap, it helps you automatically scale up your website according to the screen.
6. Keep Enough Space To Scroll
A mobile-friendly website should have enough space for the finger to move around. There is no device like a mouse to be used on mobile phones. Also, fingers occupy a larger part of the screen than a mouse, thus include a sufficient amount of space in your website for fingers.
In the end, I would like to add one more thing as a design tip is look for the direction. A desktop is wider whereas a mobile’s screen is tall and narrow.
Conclusion
I hope with the article you might have got an idea what is a mobile-friendly website and why it is necessary to adopt the mobile-friendly design for the website and how you can accomplish the same. Hurry up and check your page is mobile friendly or not and work accordingly.
Do write to me in the comment section, how you liked the article. Would like to hear from you.
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