As a business owner, you likely understand how important it is for your website to visible online. This is why many companies opt for professional help to get their website up to speed. Alternatively, they use software or websites that help to design their ideal online space. It is vital that your visitors are able to access your web pages regardless of the device they are using. This means that your website must be able to provide the same user experience on mobile devices as it does on desktop computers.

Considering the competitive nature of doing business online, having your website optimized for mobile can give you the much needed advantage over your competitors who don’t. Website developers will be used to optimizing sites for mobile, and some even consider it to be more important that a website looks good on a phone, since more and more people use their mobiles first to find a website. As you read further, you will understand the importance of optimizing your website for mobile and the steps you can follow to get it done.

Why you need to optimize for mobile

The use of mobile devices for accessing and consuming content on the net is steadily on the increase. People now do virtually everything they need to do on the internet with their Smartphones and tablets. And they want to get results in an easy to understand format.

For most people, your website could be their first impression of your business and if they are not satisfied with what they see and get, they may not come back.

Websites that are not optimized for mobile generally have a longer load time on visitors’ devices. This can frustrate visitors and cause them to leave the website earlier than they should. If your website is optimized, it provides a better user experience and keeps your visitors on your website longer. This will improve your search engine page ranking and give your business more visibility.

How to optimize for mobile

• Use Google Accelerated Mobile Pages

Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) technology is a system that allows website owners to implement a mobile version of their website designed with less technical elements and pass it through Google’s servers before reaching the clients’ devices. This increases the page load speed considerably and delivers content to the users in very little time.

AMP was officially integrated into Google’s mobile search results in February 2016. Implementing Google AMP not only allows your content to be delivered to users at tremendous speed, it also means that your mobile website will be included in Google’s SERP for mobile search. Google AMP takes away all the bells and whistles that are typically found in a website and focuses only on the necessary components.

Before you can use Google AMP, you will first have to create a different version of your website that meets Google AMP’s requirements of fewer technical components and a different web address. If you would rather retain your original URL, then simply adding ‘amp’ at the end of your web address will suffice.

Technical experts suggest that if your website is built on wordpress, rather than investing in a new project; you can use plugins to create an alternate version of your website.

Regardless of the way you choose to go about it, implementing AMP will create a duplicate of your website that is optimized for mobile devices.

• Make your website mobile responsive

A mobile responsive website presents information in an easy and clearly organized way. It detects the device your visitor is using and automatically responds by creating a display that suits the device type. This means that the same content will appear in a different way on desktop, phone and tablet. A mobile responsive website completely reformats and scales your website’s properties to responsively fit the screen it is being viewed on so that your visitors can enjoy maximum readability and usability of your content without losing any information. Alternatively, there are companies that can build completely mobile focused websites for your business, which means that the websites are developed exclusively for use on smartphones. They can help with building a fully optimized website for computers and tablets as well.

Responsive websites make use of HTML and CSS to hide, resize, enlarge, shrink and optimize content on your website to provide an adaptive browsing experience across every device. However, you may not need to write new codes to make your website responsive. Many websites are built on wordpress and there are hundreds of plugins and themes that wordpress website owners can install to give their website responsive features.

• Design for touch

One of the biggest differences between mobile and desktop devices is the method of interaction. On mobile devices, your visitors use their fingers to tap and zoom in order to get what they want. It is important that your website is optimized in such a way that your users can easily perform whatever function they need with their fingertips. This includes adding navigation suitable for touch screen devices.

For example, visitors should be able to use a finger to swipe through images on your website. And you can also make collecting of user data easier by reducing the number of fields in a form.

• Make the desktop website available

After working hard to optimize your website for mobile, you want people to see it and appreciate it. However, there will always be some people who want access to features that are not available on your mobile-optimized website.

Sometimes, giving your users a stripped-down version of your website can be counterproductive. Even though you want to simplify the layout of your site and reduce the clutter, there may be hidden information that users want to see. As such, you need to include links on multiple pages that allow users to visit the full version of your website if they want to.

• Keep testing

It is important that you keep on testing your website until you have gotten the perfect design. You need a mobile design that is pleasing to your visitors while at the same time performing all its necessary functions.

You can simply test your design by viewing your project on multiple mobile devices, or you can take advantage of any one of the several tools on the internet to ascertain how compatible your website is across multiple mobile platforms. This way, you are sure that your website will display well on any mobile device irrespective of size, make or operating system.

Over to you

The world is speedily going mobile. Very soon, virtually every activity done on the internet will be done from one mobile device or another. It is important therefore that your business have a website optimized for mobile otherwise, your competition will happily take over your market by taking your visitors away from you.

A mobile website can significantly change your visitor’s experience and give your business an edge in the industry.

Why not get on it today?