Do you know if your website is optimized for mobile devices? This article is focused on How to Optimize Your Website for Mobile Devices and Improve User Experience
Are you aware that Google recently instituted a new policy known as Mobile-First?
More and more people are using their mobile devices to browse and shop the web instead of desktop computers.
It is now possible to design websites that function uniformly across all platforms thanks to responsive web design. Even so, there are many other UX optimization techniques for mobile, and responsive design is just one of them.
You must also take into account other options if you truly want performance optimization.
This explains why creating your website with mobile users in mind is so important. Simply put, designing and creating content with mobile users in mind first is known as “mobile-first.”
Having said that, the topic of this article is not the creation of a brand-new website. We’ll see How to Optimize Your Website for Mobile Devices and Improve User Experience instead.
Additionally, spend some time concentrating on the technical aspects of enhancing the mobile user experience.
How to Optimize Your Website for Mobile Devices and Improve User Experience
1: Designing with mobile in mind
Serving desktop users is a foundational principle upon which the web is built. The real web, the real technological advancements, is best viewed on a lovely full-screen display. However, given the prevalence of smartphones and other mobile devices, it is now necessary to begin adjusting to the idea of mobile-first design.
What other design elements should you include in your mobile-first web designs besides the sensible responsive design?
- Prioritization. The display area on mobile screens has a limit. Additionally, mobile screens display content vertically as opposed to the much wider horizontal structure of desktop screens. This implies that prioritization must be used when designing. What components should users see first and foremost?
- First the content. Secondly, colour. The mobile design offers some interesting possibilities, but it is by no means comparable to desktop design in scope. So let the content come first. Make sure that your copy and other content components are readable and understandable. Distracting visual elements are much less forgiving on a mobile screen.
- simple navigation: You can’t simply click anywhere on a mobile device to go back to the home page. Unless, of course, you prepare in advance for this kind of navigation. And you ought to. When possible, experiment with seamless sticky headers in addition to Scroll-to-Top widgets.
- Use your phone (I do it all the time!) and visit your website to see if you’re doing this correctly. Look closely at how things work.
- Poke someone on the shoulder while you’re in a cafe or waiting for a flight in the airport, and ask them nicely to check your website for you. Listen to their feedback as you then take a seat. Most of the time, you’ll be surprised by how visitors to your website rate its user experience.
2. Image and icon resource optimization
How frequently do you use visuals for personal preference rather than user experience? It does occur and knowing how media optimization functions pay off if you’re going to be creative.
On websites, visual components like images, icons, and videos are the biggest bandwidth consumers.
2018’s standard for web page size. Listed by industries and various nations.
Although there isn’t a standard web page size that everyone must adhere to, it stands to reason that smaller web pages load more quickly.
So, how can you reduce the size of your visual content by a few extra KBs or even MBs?
- your image sizes. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? I honestly have lost count of the number of times I’ve been browsing a mobile site while 1980 x 1200 images were loading in the background. Instead, when appropriate, full-size photos should be offered as alternative links. Depending on the required dimensions, downsizing an image can reduce its overall size by up to 80%.
- Utilize compression to reduce file size. The process of using outside software to reduce the number of colours in an image is known as image compression or optimization. This can be done to a point where your photos retain their original quality while having a significantly smaller file size. Look no further than our thorough roundup of image compression tools for assistance with image compression.
- Examine different file formats. The PNG and JPEG file formats are well-known. They are, after all, the web’s de facto image standards. Not for long, though. WebP and SVG file formats are the newest and best technologies for delivering digital images. SVGs, for instance, can automatically scale to fit the size of the screen, using up fewer resources overall.
- Optimizing the user experience for mobile devices first is only a thoughtful process. When you design impulsively, you fail to take the long view into account. A mindful approach, however, enables you to design from the ground up with mobile users in mind.
- Insightful: You don’t have to use the same visual elements on all of your mobile designs in order to adhere to the idea of intuitive mobile design. On mobile, the user experience won’t be negatively impacted if some background images are removed and replaced with coloured backgrounds. Always look for ways to reduce bandwidth usage, no matter how little.
3. Web caching
The idea behind web caching is to copy a page so that it can later be presented to the user at any time. On the first visit to a website, pages are cached. The web server will then serve the cached version of that page when a new user tries to access it rather than the live version.
Any form of caching aims to increase website performance and reduce the number of back-end resources needed. You can set up individual intervals and other trigger-based events based on your caching solution.
Varnish, Squid, and Memcached are some of the names in web caching that are most well-known. But if you use WordPress, you can rest assured that there are many other options available.
4: AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)
The AMP project from Google is mobile optimization on a grand scale! AMP essentially reduces your pages to their bare minimum in order to deliver an incredibly quick loading experience while also prioritizing content readability. Can you muster the courage to refuse nearly instantaneous loading times given how crucial page speed is?
Conclusion
It’s not that difficult to optimize your website for a seamless mobile experience. All you need to do is exert a little willpower and voluntarily use the strategies described in this post. You probably already know about things like lazy loading and content caching, but what about staging environments and preloaders?