Designing A Mobile-friendly Website In 2021

By Author: Esolz Technologies
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Looking for tips to design a mobile-friendly website in 2021? Do you want to revamp your old website into a responsive web design in India? For the first time in the history of the Internet in the year 2015, there were more mobile searches than desktop searches. The numbers have risen ever since!

If you’re reading this article, chances are you are viewing this on a mobile device and you know the importance of having a responsive website. If you want to offer the same experience to your users through your mobile-responsive website, then we can show you how to do it!

Before diving headlong into the topic, let’s find out what a mobile-friendly website is?

When talking about a mobile-friendly website, we usually talk about showing a different version of the website to viewers accessing from mobile for providing them with a better user experience.

● Responsive web design: The design of your website adjusts to adapt to the screen size, even though you change the size of your desktop tab or browse from a mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet.

● Dynamic serving: The visitors will be ...
... shown a different version of the website depending on the device they are accessing the website from.

● A mobile app: In some cases, the visitors are offered the chance to download a completely separate app for their mobile devices and this makes sense. But, there will be a problem for those visitors who don’t want to download an app for merely visiting a website.

That is why having a responsive web design in India is the best choice ever! On the other hand, you will be complying with all of Google’s guidelines.

Tips on how to turn websites mobile-friendly:-

Given below are the tips that can help you in turning your website into a mobile-friendly one.

1. Select a mobile-responsive theme or template
This is the very first step, and choosing a mobile-responsive theme or template is crucial to building a mobile-friendly website. Some of the best places for having a mobile-responsive theme or template for your website are Squarespace, Wix, WordPress, and Themeforest. You have to ensure that you are reading the reviews before downloading or purchasing the themes.

The best thing you can do is search for a particular theme that you like and then view it from a mobile device and see for yourself how responsive the theme is.

2. Strip back the content
After choosing a mobile-responsive theme or template, the next thing that you need to do is stripping back your content on your mobile website. The following ways will help you out:

● Filter your offer: Figure out the main goal of your page and then show it prominently on your mobile version.
● Don’t place large pieces of data: The copy on your mobile-friendly website needs to be short, crisp, and appealing most of the time unless it is an article like this one.
● Shorten forms: Don’t force your visitors to fill up long forms. They are using mobile devices to visit your website and there is a solid reason behind it. They want to save time and do it on the go. You will be losing your potential customers before they get to the required field. And don’t forget to turn off autocorrect on your fields. Nothing annoys someone more than autocorrect!

3. Feather-weight images and CSS
You have to make sure the images, videos, and CSS on your mobile-friendly website are light or feather-weight. Now, what do we mean by light or feather-weight CSS and images?

Well, every element on your website has a virtual weight – file size or code – that will be loaded every time the website is clicked on.
According to Google, heavy or slow-loading websites will rank lower than the faster or lighter mobile-friendly websites. This calls for comprehensive SEO services in India if you are looking to rank higher with a slow-loading website. This does not necessarily imply, that a faster or lighter website will automatically rank higher on Google’s SERPs, you still need SEO services in India to rank on top of the SERPs of Google.

This is all the more important for mobile-responsive websites. Why? Because you don’t want to annoy your visitors with a slow mobile-friendly website; also will make the website less mobile-friendly.

Here’s how you can solve this predicament of yours:
● Compressing your images helps in reducing the size of the files. This will help the mobile website load faster.
● Upload your videos to a third-party website and then embed them to your website. In this way, you will be reducing the virtual weight of the videos by moving them to the third-party website rather than keeping them on your mobile-friendly website. You will be relieving your website of the task of loading those high-res videos every time a user clicks on your mobile-responsive website.

4. Stop using Flash
Flash is used for creating animations, but it does not work on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. Therefore, the best solution is to avoid it altogether.

5. Button size and placement
Every website makes use of buttons for linking to other sections, or forms. But a button can become a hindrance on mobile if it is not placed properly, or the size is too big or too small.
Just imagine the way you use your phone, you use your thumbs for pretty much everything. This means that when you are unable to reach a button using your thumb it becomes a pain in the backside.

Try placing your CTA buttons anywhere but the top left-hand side of the screen; that place should be reserved for placing the back button on most devices.

Now, that you know how to properly place your buttons, let’s think of making them the appropriate size: try enlarging the size of the buttons, since it is a lot easier to accurately click on a button using a mouse than a thumb.

6. Link spacing
In the previous point, we were talking about how hard it is to click accurately using a thumb than a mouse, which brings us seamlessly to this point: link spacing!

To be specific, you need to make sure that your hyperlinks on the mobile website are:
● Not too close to avoid your visitors from clicking on the wrong one by mistake.
● Linked out to mobile-optimized pages to provide a smooth user journey.

7. Large and readable font
You are advised to use large and readable fonts on your mobile website. A size of 14px is recommended for the desktop website, but this size can easily pan out to be too small for the mobile-responsive website. Therefore, increasing the size of your font would be a smart decision for your mobile-friendly website.

Another point is checking the readability of the font. You can try experimental fonts for desktop websites, but when you are designing a mobile-responsive website, it is better to stick to ‘on brand’ fonts. On desktop, you have the area for spacing out content with line breaks and images, but for mobile, the story is different.

On mobile, try to bold or capitalize different lines of text for avoiding them getting merged into one another.

8. Get rid of pop-ups
Pop-ups can work wonders when used on a desktop website, but when you are building a mobile-responsive website, pop-ups are best left out of the equation. Not only are you dealing with a smaller screen, but you are also unable to tailor the pop-up to show up at key moments like when the user exits your screen or page.

9. Test regularly
The best way of finding out the responsiveness or the mobile-friendliness of your website is by testing it regularly. The following ways will help you in doing that:
● Running URLs through Google’s mobile-friendly tool is a great way to measure the responsiveness of your mobile-friendly website.
● Trying out different device sizes from your desktop is another way of testing the responsiveness or mobile-friendliness of your website.

You can also click on the ‘Inspect’ button by right-clicking on the webpage.

Thank you for sticking with us till the end.

Let us help you in building an app that is calibrated to work on all types of devices – desktop, laptop, smartphones, smartwatches, smart TVs, and so on. We are Esolz Technologies Pvt Ltd – the best website and app development company in India – offering expertise in mobile apps and web apps. See your app dreams turn into reality with us!