Did you know that mobile devices now outnumber the world’s population? Based on real-time data from GSMA Intelligence, the number of active cell phone subscriptions is now greater than the actual number of people on Earth. If there’s one thing that most individuals on the planet would agree on, it’s that mobile devices have now become a necessity.
On February 26, 2015, Google announced that they had changed its search engine algorithm to cater to mobile-friendly websites. According to their blog post, “This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact on our search results. Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high-quality search results that are optimized for their devices.”
This caused a major disruption in page rankings, since sites that were not mobile-friendly completely fell off Google’s search engine results. Today, your business will miss out on a lot of potential visitors if your website isn’t mobile-friendly. If you want a steady stream of visitors, it’s worth investing in a new website that provides a mobile-optimized experience.
The mobile-friendly website defined
These sites are designed, developed, and optimized for mobile devices. But mobile phones and tablets come in various screen resolutions and sizes, so the newest website templates automatically adjust to fit the device they’re being displayed on.
The following tips will help you create a mobile version of your website:
- Make use of media queries
Media queries are web design functionalities that allow web page content to adapt to the type of screen they are being rendered in, whether it is from a computer, mobile phone, or tablet. Media queries will let you ask a device what size it is, and then direct the browser to display content based on the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) that you set. These web design functionalities are an important part of most mobile-friendly websites, but make sure that the system is configured properly for every device, not just the popular ones.
- Use a reliable front-end framework
Front-end frameworks are pre-built systems that quickly and automatically scale your web pages to fit any device. Applying a template is easier than manually coding all of the combinations yourself, and frameworks like Bootstrap, Skeleton, or Foundation 3 have many tools to help you tweak the site for responsiveness. Be sure to check the framework if it is compatible with your existing website and any custom coding or functions it may have.
- Keep your web design simple
One major difference between desktop users and mobile users is that the latter tends to favor simple web designs. There’s a practical reason for it: websites with large and complex content load more slowly on a mobile device, and mobile users want their media in an instant. Since many site visitors also have short attention spans, keeping things simple is better.
- Optimize the sizes of your images
When it comes to building a mobile-friendly website, your objective is to create images with the smallest possible file size while not sacrificing their quality on whatever screen they are being displayed on. This is because mobile devices use a smaller amount of bandwidth compared to desktops, so larger file sizes result in longer loading times. If a page takes a long time to download a 2 MB jpeg file of a thumbnail-sized image, then your visitors will probably leave your site.
Our expert engineers at Cyber Shift Technologies continue to help businesses solve IT issues or implement custom-built solutions. Contact us today, and shift your IT into high gear.
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