Mobile friendly website designs aren’t just a recommendation, they’re absolutely critical to engage with the modern consumer. We’re constantly on our phones and we rely on them to access information and browse for products and services.
A website design that accommodates today’s smartphones and features will play an instrumental role in helping your ecommerce brand garner the reputation and authenticity it needs to thrive and survive. You need a mobile-friendly site to quickly yet creatively enhance user shopping experiences on their phone.
This methodology for marketing and branding became increasingly rampant since the past 10 or 12 years. And you’d be surprised to know that according to a research survey posted by Statista, more than half of online engagements are done via smartphones or any other mobile device. This, on average, means that 45% of all shopping is done through the mobile phones.
These numbers are projected to significantly and rapidly increase in the next decade, and not being a part of the equation is going to be severely detrimental to your business’ sustainability. That’s primarily why companies invest a lot of time and effort into building a responsive website experience that truly resonates with today’s customers, it’s all about experience, and of course, numbers!
In light of this, we’re going to talk about four topnotch ways you can use to create the perfect mobile-friendly website design. So, here goes.
The 4 Best Strategies to Build a Reliable Mobile Friendly Web Design
1. Start with a Web Layout for Mobile Devices from the Get-Go
Look, there’s no doubt that mobile shopping and browsing has taken over completely. People don’t depend on desktop browsing anymore. This is why you need a more proactive approach to design the best mobile site. How? Well, web designers today don’t believe that desktop sites should be the benchmark for a responsive site anymore. So what they do is build a mobile design first and base the desktop version of it on that. And you should too.
By focusing your artistic and creative energies, you can start making comprehensive design decisions, focusing first on providing the end-user with the ultimate shopping and browsing experience. You see, there are plenty of factors that you’ll need to take into account. For example, there will be major size issues because users often browse their mobile phones with one hand. It would take a lot of time and efforts to iron out the kinks and design input functionalities that go beyond things like swiping or tapping.
Moreover, going mobile-first is important because a variety of other factors. For instance, desktop sites have hover animations that can only be clicked on using the mouse or the touchpad. So, if your traditional website depends on hover animations and similar visual features, you’ll have an incredibly tough time customizing and resizing everything for your responsive design.
Creating a mobile-friendly website before the desktop version is going to make things easier in terms of overall usage and user-friendly navigation. Moreover, note that making a responsive web design first will not limit your desktop version to customizations. It’s going to make things simpler on the contrary. It’s a walk in the park to customize a complex design rather than making a complex design simpler.
2. Utilize the Recommended Dimensions and Sizes for Responsive Designs
It’s true that smartphones and other mobile devices all have one common issue, they have size limitations in terms of design and usage. However, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel as there are numerous tried and tested screen resolution dimensions that you can use to create one earlier on. While there are plenty of screen dimensions and size options you can use (each will vary depending on the type of device it will be used on), designers traditionally use (360×640) resolution with an aspect ratio of 9:16.
In addition, you can also use Google Analytics to determine the best settings based on the type of devices used by the modern customer. However, it’s important to ensure that your responsive design has the capability to accommodate different variations of settings and whatnot.
When you talk about font sizes for responsive websites, we feel it’s better to use 16px for the layout and body copy of the website.
3. Incorporate Minimum but Prominent Content
Alright so you’ve selected a pretty cool and relevant design template or theme for your mobile website, and you feel that’s enough, right? Well, not true. Sure, getting the best theme in line with your brand and marketing is an excellent step, it’s just one piece of the puzzle that you should you use to perfect your responsive design. The next step is to ensure that you don’t flood the mobile site with content.
Your web copy for the website should always be concise, but to the point. This doesn’t includes blogs posts and whatnot. Keeping things short is going to eliminate sizing and dimensional issues on the website. You see, people mainly use their smartphones on the move so giving them a long form to read is not going to cut it. You need to entice the user with minimal content but impeccable visuals.
4. Go Light on your Site’s CSS and Images
If you think that your new mobile website needs to be light, then that’s a great start. However, do you know what that actually entails? Well, you see everything on your website will have a certain weight, it doesn’t matter whether you’re uploading videos or adding images, all these elements have a different weight to them virtually and will also require a lot of code to load each video and image when someone clicks on your website.
Moreover, Google has expressed a lot of importance of how the speed of a website can either make or break its ranking on SERPs. This means websites that take a lot of time to load because of a ton of videos and images will considerably fall behind in the race for brand dominance, ranking very low on all major search engines.
When you talk about a responsive web design, file size and type plays an even more important role. And you might have witnessed how painfully slow some mobile websites load, where different elements take a lot of time to correctly fall into place. The solution? Well, use compressed images, videos, animations, etc.
When you upload these elements on a mobile site, it’s important to compress and resize everything. You can use a variety of free file compressing software, which is going to retain the quality of the video or image while shrinking their size. Better yet, you can also use a third-party hosting website to upload everything. This means whenever your use images and videos, the files are going to be stored and uploaded on the hosting company’s website and not yours, making your responsive site even faster and crisper than before.
While mobile websites have become prominent and necessary to compete with popular online brands, it doesn’t mean they’re simple to make. There are a lot of factors and steps involved. However, we’ve outlined some of the best strategies you can start with to ensure you end up with something fast, visually appealing, and user-friendly.
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