In the past, website designers only had to consider computer users. Today, however, so many of us access the internet through our phones. Whether you’re creating a site for business or personal use, it’s essential to ensure that mobile browsers have a pleasant scrolling experience.
Thankfully, there are countless ways to optimise your website for mobile users, including implementing responsive and SEO-friendly website design, maintaining a clean and easily navigable UI, and limiting your pop-ups – just to name a few.
Keep reading to learn more of our top tips for designing a website in the age of smartphones.
Limit the number of pop-ups
Internet users have a complicated relationship with pop-ups. While pop up screens can be very helpful for web designers who want to promote holiday deals, encourage user action, provide information, or simply avoid loading a static page with too much content, they can get annoying when used excessively. This is especially true on mobile phones, where the ‘exit’ buttons on pop-ups are almost too tiny to press with a finger.
There are some strategies you can employ to limit the number of pop-ups on your site. For one thing, you can combine multiple messages into a single pop-up window, so users can read through them at the same time. This is an especially effective strategy when you need users to agree with multiple blocks of text. You can simply include all parts of your privacy policy or terms and conditions into a single pop-up.
Besides combining pop-ups, you can also incorporate messages into your webpage rather than creating a whole new window for them. For instance, you can use holiday design templates to easily update page designs with holiday banners, or even create special holiday sales landing pages so your site visitors have the option to seek out deals instead of being bombarded with them in the form of pop-ups.
You should also consider targeting specific users with smart pop-ups, using pop-ups that don’t cover the entire screen and exploring email marketing as an alternative. With a strong email subscriber list, you can easily save all your ad designs for their inboxes instead! They’re more likely to be appreciated there anyway.
Optimise images for mobile users
When building a mobile-friendly website, it’s essential to ensure that all the images on your various pages are clear and high-quality. To achieve this, you’ll need to brush up on your image editing tools. To retain image quality and reduce web page loading time, reduce the image size of your pictures, or convert between different file formats.
There are several things to consider when ensuring that images show properly on phones. First, make sure that the image size is small enough to load quickly and be visible on smaller screens. You should also include accurate alt text to ensure that visitors have an idea of what the image is even if it fails to load. There are many AI tools that can generate text based on the images you provide, which can be extremely useful if your website contains lots of pictures. Some other tips for making images mobile-friendly include enabling lazy loading, compressing images and using responsive images.
Including gripping images is a great way to break up large sections of text and hook your visitors’ attention. If you’re anticipating a large number of mobile viewers, make sure that your pictures are properly optimised to be visible on smartphones, and include alt text in the worst-case scenario that they don’t show up.
Implement a responsive website design
When designing a website, it’s important to take into account all the device types users might access it from. This includes mobile phones and tablets, not just computers.
A strategy many website owners implement to ensure that is what’s known as ‘responsive website design.’ There are numerous elements that go into building a site that performs well on numerous devices, but some key things to include are flexible screen resolutions, customised web page layout structures and tailored media queries.
For the latter, you can specify screen width-related conditions when deciding which style to show a particular user. This ensures that all the elements of your various pages will be legible to visitors using a range of devices.
Implementing a responsive design should be a part of your overall web design strategy from the very beginning. We’ve actually even said in the past that a responsive website is foundational to SEO hygiene and gaining rankings – so if you want your domain to reach greater heights on Google, investing in your UI is a must.
If you don’t have much experience building sites, hiring a full-stack development team that has experience optimising websites for mobile phones will be a worthwhile investment. Similarly, consider learning SEO basics to make sure that all your pages are hitting all the foundational technical SEO requirements as per Google’s algorithm. And finally, you can also greatly benefit from equipping yourself with a working understanding of UI best practices to make sure your site’s physical design, page formatting, and navigation are all intuitive and user-friendly.
Make use of visitor feedback
If you’re running a small website, it’s best to read each piece of feedback that your site visitors give you. This allows you to better understand the pain points of each individual customer, which can include unresponsive buttons, slow loading time or images that don’t appear. You can then act on the feedback to create a better user experience.
However, if your website visitors number in the thousands, reading each individual visitor’s feedback might be impractical. For larger sites, you can use specialised tools like Google Analytics, Mixpanel and Hotjar. These tools give you crucial information such as how long visitors spend on a particular page, which parts of a page they’re clicking and how much time mobile users in particular spend on your website.
You can then perform data analytics to come up with actionable changes for your site. By listening to your audience, you can eliminate blind spots and oversights, and create a site that works perfectly no matter what device people are accessing it from.
Keep your Website UX Optimised for all Devices with these Pro Tips
Considering that so many people are constantly on their smartphones, failing to make your site mobile-friendly eliminates a large chunk of your potential audience. To make sure that this doesn’t happen, it’s vital to apply several web design principles that can help optimise your site for mobile phones.
We’ve just gone over some of these principles for you above. Be sure to apply them to your own website to broaden your reach and improve user experience.
