According to hostingfacts.com, there are 3.7 billion mobile users in the world and mobile traffic accounts for over 52.25 of all Internet traffic in 2018. If mobile internet surfers do not have a good user experience on websites, they immediately abandon it so if your website is not mobile-friendly, you are definitely losing out on a large portion of the potential traffic as well as hurting your search engine page rankings. Some practical tips on making your website mobile-friendly:

Use Responsive Technology

Displaying website content on mobile devices can be quite tricky because of the varying sizes of the mobile screens. Since you cannot just develop one size and hope for the best, you need to have a website incorporating responsive technology. Responsive websites can display the contents of the web page on all mobile devices by rearranging them as per the requirement of the screen size. This makes the website completely mobile-friendly as visitors do not miss any information due to the limitation of their mobile screens. Apart from generating better conversions and sales, websites that are optimized for mobiles are also given a boost in the search engine rankings by Google as it considers it a very user-friendly feature. It is best to get responsive websites developed by professionals, as it is not a suitable project for beginners. However, you can try out the various mobile-friendly templates that are freely available if you have the time and opportunity to experiment.

Make Information Easy To Find By Users

Most people accessing information on their mobile want the information to be displayed in the shortest possible time. When you are optimizing your website for mobile users, you should try and think of all the information that the user is most likely to look for and place them in such a way that they can be accessed very quickly. Ensure that you make access to the FAQ section clear and quick so that the mobile user can find out how to do various things and not be tempted to quit the site. Making site navigation simple and intuitive is a major part of making the site mobile-friendly.

Make Buttons Easy To Click

Using a mouse to click on any website button is very easy; however, using your fingers on a mobile device with a small screen can frustrate many users if the button size is small. If there are a number of buttons situated close to each other, it can be quite easy and annoying to find that you have clicked on a button different from the one you had really intended. To make your website friendly for mobile users, you should make the buttons larger and test them out on a number of devices with varying screen sizes to ensure that they are easily clickable. How to get followers on Instagram is a question that is best answered by making sure that your website is mobile-friendly with large social media sharing buttons.

Don’t Use Flash

Even though at one point in time, Flash technology had been extremely popular, it has been discarded by virtually everyone in the website development business simply because it tended to make the sites load too slowly. Further to which, it is now not supported by many web browsers as well as the top mobile operating systems, Android and iOS. If you include flash on your website, you can be sure that mobile users will not be able to see it. There are many alternatives that will allow having a strong web design that users will find appealing.

Include the Viewport Meta Tag

If the width of the web page were the same on mobile devices as on desktops, mobile users would have a tough task scrolling from one side to the other trying to access the page contents. Since it can be very awkward to do this, most mobile users would abandon the site rather than put up with the difficulty. One of the easiest ways of controlling how your website appears on the screens of mobile devices is by using the viewport Meta tag. The viewport Meta tag informs the browsers about the width of the screen of the device it is being displayed on and accordingly, the page width is adjusted for proper display. Enabling the viewport Meta tag is very simple with just a single line of code needing to be pasted on each web page.

Turn Off the Autocorrect Feature for Forms

Though in most situations, the autocorrect feature can be pretty useful and makes life convenient, it can be very irritating if it is left on for, the forms that users need to fill in on the website. This is because, the autocorrect function comes into play and starts making changes as it thinks fit for the information the user is trying to fill up, a task, which, nobody really enjoys on a mobile device. Having the autocorrect function “on” can make form filling very irritating and time-consuming and turn off many users. It is best that you include a code for the autocorrect to be turned off in the HTML.

Incorporate Larger Font Sizes

The entire purpose of the website gets defeated if the contents on the screen cannot be read easily by the user because most of them will not take the trouble of enlarging the text to read it. You should carry out a series of tests to establish which size of the fonts display correctly on most mobile phone screens and make that the standard; typically, this is never less than 14px. It is also a good policy to use only standard fonts as otherwise the page loading time goes up, as the font needs to be downloaded by the browser in use.

Conclusion

Optimizing your website for mobiles is not a one-time exercise. As technologies keep on changing and more and more different types of mobile devices are used, it is important that you keep on testing your website to find out if it displays properly. While you can do this informally, it can be better to employ professional testers and take into account any feedback given by users.