Mobile Website Optimisation – The 2016 Guide
According to the most recent mobile web statistics, almost one third of all web traffic in the UK now comes from mobile phones. This proportion has more than doubled in the last two years and is expected to grow rapidly over the next 12 months. For this reason, mobile website optimisation is increasingly important.
If your website isn’t mobile optimised, loads slowly or behaves strangely on mobiles then you have a serious problem. Within a few years, almost half of your visitors aren’t going to be able to use your website properly. Even if your website does load on a mobile phone, you still need to avoid certain elements that can slow your visitors’ phones to a crawl.
In this article, we’ll expose just how much you could lose if you don’t make mobile website optimisation a priority in 2016. You’ll discover tips and tools you can use to improve your website right now. We’ll also share the strategies you should use when building a website to make it mobile friendly.
How much money are you losing?
Visitors expect your website to load quickly, work well and answer their questions. Sounds pretty simple right? But do you know just how fast they expect it to be? According to a recent study, around half of internet users expect the websites they use to load in 2 seconds or less. Every second longer than that it takes loses you around 17% of your website visitors. A 10 second loading time means half your visitors will be gone before the page even loads.
If you want to know just how much mobile traffic is going to your website, then take a look in your Google Analytics account. This will show you exactly how many of your visitors are using mobile phones or tablets. On some websites we manage, this can be as high as 80% of all visitors. All these visitors could be unable to use your website if it’s not optimised correctly.
Having a mobile unfriendly website also seriously damages your search engine optimisation. Google now checks the mobile optimisation of every site in its index. Any website which doesn’t pass the test appears lower in the search results on both desktop and mobile.
Mobile Website Optimisation Best Practice
The entire process of mobile website optimisation can seem a bit daunting. The good news is that there are simple things you can do right now that make a big difference. Firstly, run your site through Google’s Site Speed Tool. This will identify any major issues that are slowing down your site and making it mobile unfriendly.
One of the easiest issues to fix is image optimisation. Even fairly standard images can be several megabytes in size. If you have many of these on a page, the loading can slow to a crawl on mobiles. Luckily, there are several free online tools that can help with this part of mobile website optimisation. If you’re running a WordPress based website then there are image optimisation plugins that will automatically do the job for you.
If you’re not using WordPress, or another CMS that offers this functionality then make sure you optimise all images before uploading them. There are plenty of free online tools that will help you to do this.
This is just one of the factors that impacts your mobile website optimisation score. Our free website review service can help to identify other issues that could be slowing down your website. Click here to register for your free review.
Does your website actually work?
We’re not talking about basic functionality here. Does your website actually do what your visitors want it to? The expectations of mobile and desktop visitors can be quite radically different. For one thing, if you have a physical presence, people could be on your website when they’re visiting you or trying to find you.
It’s a basic rule of web design that your website should be as simple and efficient as possible. This is even more important on mobile devices. Avoid the temptation to use giant images, giant image sliders or other large files. They will destroy the user experience and lose you visitors.
If you’d like to find out more about mobile website optimisation then our free website review is the place to start. Our web experts will take a look at your website using specialist tools and produce a report highlighting areas you can improve. It’s completely free so why not request yours today?
