In 2024, having a mobile-friendly website isn’t just a nice-to-have—it’s essential. Mobile traffic now makes up more than half of web traffic worldwide. If you want to attract and retain visitors, offering a top-notch mobile browsing experience is a must.
In this article, I’ll share 12 tips for creating a mobile-friendly website design. These tips can help you maintain your mobile traffic and even boost your conversions and sales.
Understanding Mobile-Friendly Website Design
So, what exactly is a mobile-friendly website design? It’s a design that looks great and works well on mobile devices. Here are a few ways to achieve that:
Responsive Design
This is where your website automatically adjusts to fit the screen size of whatever device a visitor is using. It’s flexible and ensures a good experience for everyone, regardless of their device.
Dynamic Serving
With dynamic serving, visitors are shown a different version of your site that’s optimized for their specific device. This means the content is tailored for the best possible performance on either desktop or mobile.
Mobile App
Some businesses choose to create a mobile app, allowing visitors to access their content through an app specifically designed for mobile use.
Responsive design was the big thing a few years ago. Nowadays, it’s considered the bare minimum. Many designers are now adopting a mobile-first approach, which means designing for mobile devices first and then scaling up for desktop. Mobile-friendly design sits nicely between these two approaches, ensuring a good user experience across all devices.
If you think a mobile app might be the best route for your business, we can help with both iPhone and Android app development. Just reach out to us for a quote.
The Importance of Mobile-Friendly Design
As of 2024, Google uses mobile-first indexing for all new websites. This means that Google primarily uses the mobile version of your site for indexing and ranking. If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, you could see a drop in your Google rankings, web traffic and sales.
Here’s a shocking stat: 62% of visitors to your mobile site are less likely to buy from you if they have a bad experience. That’s a lot of potential sales down the drain.
So, how do you make sure you’re not losing out on sales due to a poor mobile experience?
Let’s dive into the 12 tips you can use to create a mobile-friendly website design that impresses visitors and boosts sales.
How to Create a Mobile-Friendly Website
Creating a mobile-friendly website starts with the basics, like using responsive design but it doesn’t stop there. We’ve got tips that cover every aspect of your site and content to make sure your mobile visitors—and Google—are impressed.
1. Implement a Responsive Theme
Starting with a responsive theme is a great first step for mobile optimization. This is especially useful if you’re just setting up your business site or if you have low traffic. For more established sites, changing themes might be a bit challenging but it’s still doable.
Once you’ve picked a responsive theme, test it on various devices to ensure it looks good on all screens and platforms (like iOS and Android). This step is crucial to make sure your site provides a consistent experience for all users.
2. Keep Navigation Simple
Navigation is critical on mobile because there’s less screen space to work with. On your desktop site, you might have a complex navigation menu with many options and levels but on mobile, simplicity is key.
Aim to have your content fit on a single screen to avoid making users scroll or zoom too much. Take a look at WWF’s mobile navigation as a good example. Their navigation menu pops up as a simple grid with no need for scrolling.
This design is much more user-friendly compared to their desktop site viewed on a mobile device, where the links are small and harder to tap without accidentally clicking the wrong one.
Keeping navigation simple helps ensure that users can easily find what they’re looking for without frustration.
3. Use Short Forms
When it comes to forms, keeping them short and sweet is key, especially on mobile. People are more likely to abandon long forms, so it’s important to streamline the information you collect.
Take a hard look at your forms and ask yourself if you really need all the information you’re asking for. Most of the time, all you need is a name and email address. You can gather more details later if necessary. This principle also applies to checkout pages. If your checkout process asks for too much information, shoppers are likely to leave without completing their purchase.
The goal is to make forms as frictionless as possible.
4. Include Strong Calls to Action
To get visitors to take action on your site, your calls to action (CTAs) need to be clear and eye-catching. Use high-contrast colors to make them stand out and ensure the action you’re asking them to take is obvious.
With limited screen space on mobile, you should keep your CTAs focused on a single purpose. For example, let’s look at WWF’s mobile site. Their CTA is designed to be big, noticeable and easy to tap, offering two options: making a donation or purchasing products. Although there are two choices, both serve the same ultimate goal—supporting WWF.
The key is to make sure users can easily click on the option they want without having to zoom in.
5. Add a Search Function
You might worry that simplifying your navigation menu will make it harder for users to find what they’re looking for. This is where a search function becomes essential.
Adding a search bar at the top of your site ensures that users can quickly and easily find specific content. It improves the overall user experience and helps visitors get to the information they need without frustration.
Having a search function is a great way to balance a clean, minimal navigation menu while still providing users with a way to access all the content on your site.
6. Emphasize Customer Service Options
Your mobile site needs to make it easy for users to get in touch with you. Be sure to include your phone number, email address, location (if you have a physical store) and links to your social media profiles. This way, if visitors run into any issues, they know how to reach you.
No matter how user-friendly your mobile design is, there will always be times when customers need assistance. Making contact information readily available helps keep users from leaving your site in frustration.
7. Use the Right Sizes
It’s crucial to ensure that your buttons and links are the right size. They need to be large enough for users to tap without having to zoom in or accidentally hitting the wrong link.
Most people access mobile sites from screens that are 4 to 6 inches and many use their thumbs to navigate. Best practices suggest keeping important links and buttons within the “thumb zone,” which is the area that’s easiest to reach with a thumb. Here is an example.
The thumb zone is typically the lower center part of the screen (Green area). Placing your clickable elements here makes navigation easier and improves the overall user experience.
8. Don’t Use Popups
While popups can be effective for lead generation, they can be a nightmare on mobile if not done correctly. On smaller screens, popups can be hard to close, especially when users are navigating with their thumbs. They might accidentally click on the popup instead of closing it, leading to frustration.
If you decide to use popups, make sure they’re optimized for mobile. Use a popup maker that offers mobile-specific campaigns and test them thoroughly to ensure a smooth user experience. Make sure the popups are easy to close and don’t interfere with the user’s ability to navigate your site.
9. Don’t Use Huge Blocks of Text
Big chunks of text can be overwhelming and difficult to read on mobile devices. Keep your sentences and paragraphs short and be mindful of how much space your text takes up on the screen.
Your goal is to communicate your message clearly and quickly. If your important points are buried in long paragraphs, visitors might not stick around to read them. Focus on what you want your mobile visitors to do and what they need. Make it easy for them to get the information they need with minimal text.
10. Select a Mobile-Friendly Font
Not all fonts are created equal when it comes to mobile. The font you choose for your mobile site needs to be easy to read.
Consider using different font styles to differentiate content. For example, use your standard font for body text but opt for bold or all caps for headlines. Since mobile screens are small, it’s essential to make the text as readable as possible.
11. Boost Your Site Speed
If your site takes more than three seconds to load, you could lose over half your traffic. That’s a lot of potential visitors and customers gone.
To improve your mobile site speed, keep your design simple. Remove unnecessary images, GIFs and other elements that might slow down your site. Faster-loading sites not only provide a better user experience but also lead to higher conversion rates.
These tips are essential for creating a mobile-friendly website that not only looks good but also performs well. Keep these principles in mind and you’ll be on your way to a site that mobile users will love.
12. Implement Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) use a special format of HTML designed to make pages load very fast for mobile users. Since AMP is a Google project, these pages often get better treatment in mobile search results.
However, AMP might not be the perfect fit for everyone. One thing to consider is that you’ll need to maintain two versions of your content: your regular site and the AMP version. If you’re using WordPress, this is very straightforward thanks to the AMP plugin. But if your site isn’t on WordPress, you’ll have to follow Google’s AMP tutorial to set it up.
By implementing AMP, you can significantly improve your page load times, which can lead to better user experiences and potentially higher rankings in mobile search results.
5 Best Examples Of Mobile-Friendly Website Design
Now that we’ve covered the essentials of creating a mobile-friendly website, let’s check out five stellar examples to inspire you.
Tesla Motors
Tesla’s mobile site nails it with easy-to-read fonts and font sizes. The buttons are perfectly sized and positioned for thumb tapping, making navigation a breeze. The images load quickly and look great, even on smaller screens.
What’s impressive is that despite being packed with information and images, the site doesn’t feel cluttered. The calls to action are clear and stand out, guiding users smoothly through the site.
Bloomberg Business
Bloomberg’s mobile site keeps it simple with a classic black-and-white design that looks sharp and clean on mobile screens. The font is straightforward and easy to read, making headlines, subheadings and body text clear and distinct. They also use a minimal number of fast-loading images that enhance the content without slowing down the site.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp’s mobile site offers smooth navigation and a good flow. While there’s a lot of text, it’s well-organized and broken up with fast-loading images and GIFs, making it engaging to scroll through. The navigation menu is streamlined with just four options and a search bar, providing ample space for easy thumb-tapping on the desired links.
Microsoft
Microsoft’s mobile site features a flat design that is very easy to navigate and scroll through. The images load quickly and the fonts are visually appealing and easy to read.
Abduzeedo
Abduzeedo’s mobile site stands out with its beautiful simplicity. The classic black-and-white color scheme makes the images really pop. The navigation icons are conveniently placed at the bottom of the screen, making it easy to move around the site. One of our favorite aspects of this site is the clean and stylish font they use.
Conclusion
Creating a top-notch mobile-friendly website involves a lot of details and considerations. With so many factors at play, it’s easy to miss something important.
By following these tips for mobile-friendly website design, you can ensure you get it right from the start.
Today, having a responsive site isn’t enough—it needs to be designed specifically with mobile users in mind.
Your website is often the first and only chance to make a good impression. At our digital marketing agency, we’ve been building websites for over 15 years and we’re confident we can help you create an amazing mobile-friendly design. Contact our web design service for a free quote!
