Are you planning to create or optimize a website to focus on mobile-first web design?
There are many reasons why you should have a mobile-first website. Not only do most companies do it, but Google also rewards websites designed for mobile users.
Also, with smartphones becoming more popular and 52.4% of internet traffic generated by mobile devices, it's a smart choice if you're running a business.
But before you create a mobile website, you should know that mobile-first web design isn't a walk in the park. Many things can prevent your site from becoming successful, but with our help, your website can become one of the best.
Read below for the ten most essential design tips for mobile-first web design. Our tips will help your website be more compatible with mobile devices.
1. Responsive Web Design is Essential to mobile-first web design
Responsive web design is often dubbed "The Future of the Web" because it caters to desktop and mobile devices. In addition, its intuitive and straightforward interface makes it the best choice for new websites.
Responsive Web design is the method that advocates that design and development should respond to the website visitor's behavior and environment based on screen resolution size, platform, and positioning.
The responsive design practice consists of elastic grids and layouts, images, and intelligent use of CSS queries. In addition, as the user switches from laptops to tablets, the website automatically switches to accommodate screen resolution, image size, and programming scripting languages. In other words, the website would have the coding technology to change the user's preferences responsively. Responsive Web Design would eliminate the need for a different design and programming phase for each new device designed for the internet.
2. Pay Attention to Font Sizes
Most people try to create mobile websites like they designed desktop websites and don't stop thinking of how their visitors may react. As a result, most visitors may have difficulty understanding what's on their screen. And because they're on a mobile device, tapping the back button is an easy way for them to leave.
To prevent people from leaving as soon as they arrive, you should design your website to be a more user-acceptable place by taking the time to adjust the font sizes for each resolution in responsive design. Most problems come from people not seeing what's written on their screens. So, change the font sizes to fit the screen so visitors don't have to zoom in to read it.
3. Create an Amazing Landing Page
Landing pages are the first thing people will see when visiting your website. Being your website's first impression, you need to make it to catch their attention.
Consider doing things like adding eye-catching images to your landing pages. Something that tells them they're welcome and promotes exploring. That said, make sure the photos relate to your business.
Images are only one of the elements your landing page needs when considering mobile-first web design.
4. Make Navigation Easy
Navigating a website with poor design can be frustrating for first-time visitors. Unfortunately, this often leads to them leaving your website, and this bad experience can deter them from returning in the future, affecting business.
It would help if you considered utilizing a simple column-style design. A single-column style gives freedom to browse at leisure. It's also the best choice for mobile devices like smartphones.
Also, consider categorizing your web pages. Doing this helps condense your entire website into a single column. In addition, categories make it easier for people to find what they're looking for in a shorter amount of time.
5. Make Things Interactive
A way for you to make your users engaged with the website is to make it interactive. For example, say your website is an online menu for your restaurant. You can have the image of a unique menu item spread as the base.
Make it so that when your visitor clicks on a particular food item, the website redirects them to a page that displays all food items that include the thing they clicked on.
Doing this can open up many more possibilities to make your website more engaging.
6. Manage Your Ads
Nothing like a sudden pop-up ad ruins a visitor's impression of your website. The ads come out of nowhere and take up the entire screen. In addition, these ads often take a lot of processing power to display, slowing down the user's device along the way.
The best mobile websites manage their ads to not interfere with their visitors. People do this by coding ads to appear in a specified area. A space between sections on your website is an excellent place to put them.
7. Be Mindful of Your Website's Speed
A slow-loading website lowers your SEO score and entices your visitors to leave. Many people tend to leave a website if they have to wait for more than a few seconds before something loads.
You can improve your website's responsiveness by removing any unnecessary plugins. For example, specific plugins take a lot of time to run. Your website can use this time instead to load web pages.
There are also other ways to speed up websites made in WordPress, like installing a caching plugin made for WordPress, compressing images and videos, and coding your plugins to load asynchronously.
8. Optimize Your Site's Search Bar
Nothing frustrates a visitor like not finding what they're looking for. Unfortunately, this problem presents itself most often on shopping sites.
You can optimize website search by condensing the available results to relevant items. While it may sound obvious, a surprising number of web designers don't do this. Unfortunately, this leads to website visitors getting results that don't do with their search.
9. Test Your Website
Like every project made for business, running a few tests is essential. It would help if you did this every time you implement something new.
Doing this can save you the hassle of fixing a problem after launching the update.
10. Ask for Customer Feedback
No opinion should be more important to you than your customer's. So place a suggestion or comments area close to the bottom of your website. You can also let your customers contact you through a contact page.
Feedback Forms lets customers say what you can do to improve their experience on your website. This form will also increase your user engagement.
Use These 10 Tips for the Best Mobile-First Web Design
With the help of this guide, developing a website with a mobile-first web design should be more accessible than ever. So start improving your website now!
Don't stop here. Feel free to explore other ways to improve your site. Also, feel free to contact a local web designer near me to see how we can help you with mobile-first designs.
