With innovative gadgets and mobile devices ruling the technology, the desktop age has now transferred to the mobile era.
Undeniably true! Due to the mobile transition, designers have become more concerned about the user experience (UX).
Nowadays, a mobile version of almost every website and apps is available for download. Indeed, it becomes equally important to focus on UX in the same way the designers aim at UI.
For making the mobile version of a website more interactive, it is essential to know how to optimize your website for mobile search.
Ways to Optimize Website for Mobile
- Enable Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
- Know your Users & Intended Market
- Responsive WordPress Theme
- Mobile-First Approach
- Simple Functionality, Seamless Navigation
- Optimize Content for Better Accessibility
- Speed Up Your Website
First Things First, Enable AMP
Do you know the mobile internet’s daily media consumption has grown by 504% since 2011?
AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages, Google’s project that aims to deliver a smooth mobile experience.
Since its introduction in 2015, the project has gained immense popularity, and many sites are using AMP.
Having an AMP version means the mobile version of the website operates excellently with amplified performance.
So, what does AMP do?
AMP is a method to create a mobile-friendly version of website pages. It eliminates unnecessary content by removing redundant media files and layouts.
In fact, AMP does more than that. It creates special versions of your websites JavaScript and HTML, to improve its appearance as well as performance on mobile devices.
However, you do not need to understand all the technical aspects to use technology. It’s pretty simple to transform your website into AMP.
If a user opens your website on any mobile device, the AMP version of the site will be served for optimizing the user experience.
You can reap additional benefits by using AMP markup for your website.
You can use AMP for WordPress Plugin as it will automatically generate AMP versions of your webpages. This plugin will allow you to easily optimize website for mobile WordPress.
According to Statista, mobile devices accounted for 48% of webpage views worldwide, as of February 2019.
Related: What is SEO 2020 | Keywords | On Page Optimization | SEO Website
Know Your Users & Intended Market
Prior to building a website, for mobile as well as desktop, it is important that your decide a niche and your target audience.
It will help your optimize your website for mobile search.
Performing a thorough study on the type of users that the website is intended for will optimize the marketing and scalability parameters.
It is essential to know your audience to make mobile-friendly website which is compatible with your audience demands.
Undoubtedly, it’s equally important to understand user behavior as two different kinds of users prevails
- those who browse the website to perform a particular task
- those who browse the website without any intended goal.
Therefore, it’s crucial to ensure that the website must fulfill the specified aims of its audience.
Use a Responsive WordPress theme
Responsive web design is mandatory for maintaining a higher ranking.
In fact, responsive design is a simple and straightforward answer for ‘how to optimize your website for mobile search’.
Believe it or not, there are numerous screen sizes available, which makes it a bit difficult for which size to design for.
Responsive HTML code adapts according to the orientation of mobile device as well as screen size.
Responsive design means that your website will open on all screen sizes, from laptop to mobile phone and tablet to watch.
Moreover, it ensures that the website will fill the screen while displaying information clearly, irrespective of the screen size.
These layouts take over the traditional web layouts and set standards for today’s web designing community.
Moreover, these layouts are a bit tricky, but by using them, designers can become assured that their designs would be accessed by a large number of users, irrespective of their screen size.
Keep in Mind the Mobile-First Approach
Today, most of the web developing companies aim towards designing technologies compatible with mobile devices.
The tendency to design apps for mobile phones has increased in recent years in comparison to developing the correlated designs and techniques for laptops or desktop computers.
So, if you are sure that your website will be accessed by a large volume of users on a mobile phone or mobile device, there is no harm in adopting the ‘Mobile-First’ strategy.
These practices will make your website more scalable by offering accessibility to a broad spectrum of users.
Simple Functionality, Seamless Navigation
The website functionality must be kept simple so that the visitors can enjoy their visit and keep coming back.
With consistent and smooth functionality, users would love to browse through, and this will increase the website’s customer retention ratio.
Straightforward navigation is the key to ensuring faster functionality. Moreover, it’s in fact a vital component for optimizing a website for mobile search.
Therefore, always ensure to work on all the buttons, columns, tools, and other design elements to boost the functional speed while making it faster.
The fact is that when users put efforts in accessing the website, they would find it rather useful to move to another one.
Therefore, the navigation needs to be effortless for higher outputs.
Optimize Content for Better Accessibility
Here, content means all the text, images, hyperlinks, etc.
Sometimes, designers think that there is already a large volume of content, and hiding a little volume doesn’t matter.
However, hiding even a single element of information on mobile layouts can leave the users frustrated.
Therefore, always ensure to display every single bit of data on the mobile layout in the same way it is available on other bigger screens.
So, make sure you choose a right WordPress theme that displays data completely to your users.
Related: How to Write SEO Optimized Content for your Website?
Speed Up your Website
Speed is significantly important.
Slow page load time is a significant reason for higher bounce rates. Pages that rank higher in SERP have faster load times.
Improve the site load speed by compressing images. Not just it frees up a significant volume of space but leads to better page load speed.
You can use Smush for WordPress for compressing the images without compromising the quality.
Avoid using Flash on your site as it will unnecessarily add load to the webpages, making them bulky.
You might not know; Google’s AMP project has banned Flash, and that’s because of all good reasons.
However, Flash is good for gaming websites.
Another potential practice to improve your website load speed is minimizing the code to the smallest size without affecting its function. You can use Minify Code for minifying your website’s code.
Conclusion
If you are looking forward to developing a mobile-friendly website, there’s a lot of ways to optimize your site for mobile.
Mobile is the future of the internet and online searches.
Today, more people are using mobile devices and the time we spend using them is soaring day by day.
Improve your search rankings and be a part of a long journey by optimizing your website to a mobile-first approach.
What practices are you adopting to preparing your website for the mobile web? Please drop your experience and views in the comments below.