Is your website mobile-friendly? You may think you do because the website displays on mobile proportionally. However, it may not provide the best user experience. For local businesses, a website that renders and works on mobile is a necessity. If you’re considering a website redesign, these are the elements mobile-friendly websites must have.
What Does Mobile-Friendly Mean?
In short, it’s the optimization of a website design for mobile devices. With smaller screens, your design and backend coding work in sync to deliver an excellent user experience.
Responsiveness Is the First Must-Have
Before anything else, a website must be responsive to be mobile-friendly. For this to occur, the design must have flexible, scalable grids, layouts, and images. The coding on the backend is what makes the website automatically display correctly regardless of the device. It is the core element upon which everything else builds. As of October 2021, 55.75% of website traffic was from mobile devices. So, you can’t afford not to make this a priority!
Intuitive and Simple Navigation
Have you ever been on a website on your mobile device, and the navigation was hard to find? That’s frustrating and leads to high bounce rates. You want the navigation to be easy and intuitive, making it convenient for the user. On either side of the screen, an icon with “Menu” is the clearest way to nudge visitors to go there to find the pages they want to review.
Clearly Define Sections on Your Pages
With mobile-friendly websites, users do more scrolling than desktop because of the space limitations. On your home and most interior pages, you should break up sections of your website purposefully. One of the best ways to do this is with different backgrounds. They can be subtle, but they relay to the visitor that the “topic” is changing.
Text That’s Readable
Mobile sites should use legible font choices that are readable from smaller devices. This is no place to use a nontraditional text. It may look cool, but users will have trouble reading it. Font choice is not the only factor here. Contrast matters, too. You should either use dark text and a light background or vice versa.
Buttons Sized Right
Another critical aspect of mobile-friendly websites is the button size and placement. You want people to click those buttons, but that can be challenging if they are too small. You have to consider on mobile that a click comes from touch, not a mouse. The appropriate sizing will be part of the responsive coding.
Additionally, make sure you don’t crowd the button with other images or nearby text, making them harder to navigate. Padding, which is spacing around buttons, is the aspect that matters in clickability. Google recommends at least 48 pixels of “touch target” for buttons to be accessible.
Declutter the Footer
Your website footer may have full navigation, social media icons, contact information, copyright, and more. On mobile, that’s going to look overwhelming and confusing. Instead, you can declutter the footer links by grouping that content in dropdowns so users can choose to explore it. You already have your mobile-friendly navigation, so it’s not going to disrupt usability.
Clean Design with Lots of White Space
For text-heavy pages, you’ll want a clean design with nothing distracting, so visitors focus on the words. Using lots of white space and breaking up large text blocks will help users consume content in the most effective way.
Mobile-Friendly Websites Offer the Best User Experience
If your website fails in any of these areas, you’ll want to improve them to deliver the best user experience. If you need help or aren’t sure where to start, connect with our team of website design professionals today.
