It’s so important that you build your site first and foremost for mobile. When you do that, it will work great on any platform. The simplicity of a mobile-first site still looks and works great when viewed on a desktop computer. Using responsive design with mobile first in mind for how you arrange and display the content, navigation, and calls to action, will make a huge difference in conversions.
- Make It Fast Loading — Your site should of course always be fast. But, on mobile it needs to be even faster. People are not patient and they want to click on an email message CTA and go right to the page they’re supposed to go to, be able to read it fast, and for it to work.
- Don’t Assume Your Site Works on Mobile — Never believe that your site works on mobile the way you want it to, even if you use a “responsive” theme or template for your site. Test it out before you get too far building the site so that you can be sure that it works and looks the way you want it to.
- Put Key Information Up Front — When you build a mobile-focused site, you’ll want things like price, location, directions and your CTA to be right up front where it won’t be missed. If the information people are looking for is easy to find on your site, it’ll be easy to find and use via mobile too.
- Use Self-Hosted Responsive WordPress Themes — One of the easiest ways to build a mobile site is to use self-hosted WordPress and choose responsive themes. Also, choose themes that are minimal in nature so that they don’t have too much going on and will naturally look better and perform faster.
- Format Your Content So That It’s Easily Scannable — Using formatting that includes plenty of white space, lists, bullets, and numbers is a great way to make the content easy for your viewers to scan on a mobile device. It also looks better when viewing via PC.
- Use Many Types and Formats of Content — People like all types of content. Video, text, images, podcasts and so forth are all great types and formats of content to use. Remember that your audience, while they may be very similar sometimes, may want to learn in different ways.
- Use a Mixture of Long-Form and Short-Form Content — On mobile they’re going to want to read shorter content, but long-form content is also good for SEO. Therefore, use a mixture of both. When you include long-form content, it can help to include a summary of the content at the top for mobile users.
- Test Everything You Do — Again, just because the theme says it’s responsive, just because you think you did everything right doesn’t mean it’ll be just right. While perfection isn’t something that can be found, you still should test everything you do to make sure it really works.
Ensuring your website works on mobile is important because more and more people are browsing websites using their mobile devices. Whether they click a link in their email to get to your landing pages, or they conduct a Google voice search for your information, they’re using mobile to do it and you need to be prepared for it.