What Is Mobile Website Optimization?: A Complete Beginner’s Guide

When you think of someone using the internet or web surfing, you probably think of someone on a desktop computer.

Times have changed quickly over the last five years. People no longer sit tethered to a desk to surf the web. They use their phones.

In fact, mobile web traffic accounts for about 70% of all internet traffic. Look around you. How many people are looking down at their phones?

Mobile website optimization is the key to get your website ready for mobile traffic. Read on to discover what it is and how to improve your mobile site.

What Is Mobile Website Optimization?

Mobile website optimization is the process to make sure your site loads quickly on mobile devices. It also creates a consistent user experience for people who access your site on desktop and mobile devices.

Is mobile site optimization really necessary? Yes, and it’s not just because most people access your site on a cell phone or tablet.

A mobile-friendly site impacts SEO. It used to be that page speed on desktop devices was the priority. That changed in 2018 when Google rolled out page speed on mobile devices as a ranking factor.

The company took it a step further in 2019 when mobile-first indexing came out. Google now uses the mobile version of websites when indexing.

That version is what Google looks at when evaluating the content, speed, and other ranking factors of your site. The algorithm then determines how your site ranks in search results.

If your mobile site isn’t optimized, you’re hurting your ability to get discovered in search results.

Consistent Brand Experience

Some sites have a mobile version and a desktop version. There are times when these sites function differently, which gives users a bad experience.

A consistent brand experience is important to you because it can increase revenue. Users have a similar experience on desktop and mobile devices. They’ll know what to expect when they visit your site from any device.

Mobile Site Optimization and Sales

Do you expect visitors to make a purchase when they visit your website? If more than half of visitors are on your mobile devices, you’re missing out on sales.

Study after study shows that there is a link between mobile site speed and page conversions. Deloitte found that one-tenth of a second can make a huge difference to your business.

A site that’s optimized to improve loading times by one-tenth of a second sees a dramatic rise in the average order value (AOV).

In retail, conversions jumped by over 8% while AOV increased by 9.2%.

Similar increases were found in luxury goods and travel sites. Not only that, landing page bounce rates improved as well.

The lesson for you to learn is that mobile website optimization is good for business.

Mobile Website Optimization Tips

Now that you know why mobile site optimization is important to your business, let’s take a look at how to optimize your site. These quick tips show you the way.

The first step is to do a mobile site audit. Grab a few different mobile devices and use your website just like a new visitor. Note the things that you like and the things that you don’t like about your mobile site.

Check the mobile page speed using Google’s Page Speed Insights. You’ll get technical insights as to what slows your page speed down.

Image Compression

Images are by far the largest files on a website. These can take up valuable resources when a page is trying to load on a mobile device.

Don’t upload images without compressing them first. This makes the files smaller without compromising image quality.

You can use an image compression plugin that does the work for you. You can also use an image editor to compress the images before you upload them.

Don’t Upload Videos

More sites use video to make an immediate connection with website visitors. Similar to images, they take forever to load if you upload them directly to your site.

Use a separate video hosting service and embed the videos on your site.

Make Your Site Responsive

What’s the difference between mobile-friendly, responsive, and a mobile version of a website?

A mobile version of a website is a completely different version of a site. It usually resides on a subdomain, so mobile users will see a domain name like https://m.domainname.com.

A mobile-friendly site is a broad term that refers to a site that has some optimizations, but might not be fully optimized.

A responsive site is one where it automatically adapts the site to the screen.  This is a great solution for mobile optimizations.

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of different mobile devices and screen sizes on the market. Making your site experience consistent across these devices will work well in your favor.

Focus On the User Experience

Once you take care of the technical side of mobile website optimization, you need to ensure the user experience is amazing.

There are a few simple things you can do to ensure that. For starters, you can change the font size to make sure the text is easy to read on small devices.

Use a lot of headings and sub-headings to break up the text. That makes the text easy to scan, so readers get the gist of the content and decide to move on to the next page.

Mobile Site Optimization for a Better Experience

Mobile usage skyrocketed in recent years, and you have to have a website ready for that traffic. Mobile website optimization is a process, but it translates into more revenue for your business.

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