Mobile Website Design: Important Things You Need to Know

In this digital age, you ABSOLUTELY need a mobile-friendly website for your business.

Why?

As you read this post, your potential customers may be searching for your business on their mobile devices.

A mobile-friendly website means a site that's created and optimized for smartphones and tablets.

There are even stats that point towards the importance of a mobile-friendly website:

• 55.4% of web users use mobile devices to purchase online.
• Moreover, 61% of users will never return to a site that isn’t mobile-friendly.

The number of global mobile users is also expected to grow with each passing year.

All of this points to one thing: the need to have a mobile-friendly website in order to offer the best user experience to mobile users visiting your site. It plays a crucial role in helping them decide whether or not they should purchase from you.

In this post, we'll discuss all the important things you need to know about mobile website design, the process in which you take steps to optimize the web experience for mobile users. Here's what you should keep in mind when creating a mobile-friendly website.

1. The Text Should Be Large Enough to Read

This is one of those mobile website design tips that may seem obvious, but deserves a mention because it plays a huge role in making your website mobile-friendly.

Your mobile site must have text that's large enough to read comfortably. The users should never have to scroll left/right or zoom in to read something.

Check this example where the text shown on the site perfectly fits the screen size of a mobile:

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2. Use Large Buttons

Your business' mobile site needs to have buttons large enough for users to tap on. They should never have to zoom in while tapping on the buttons.

Note: Never place hyperlinks too close together. This is because a user attempting to click on one link may end up clicking on another.

3. Go for a Simplistic Design

One of the best mobile website design tips to follow is to go for a simple and clean design. As you only have a few seconds to convey information about your business when a user visits your site on mobile, you need to opt for a simplistic design.

Tip: Too much copy, graphics, and videos can hamper the loading speed of your site when a mobile user visits it. So, an uncomplicated design with a focused copy is the way to go.

4. Think With Your Thumb

Ensure your mobile website is such that a user is easily able to navigate your site with a single thumb (or index finger). They shouldn't feel the need to pinch to zoom or use any extra fingers. This way, you know you have designed a site that users can easily use on their mobile devices, on the go.

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5. Create Attention-Grabbing Calls-to-Action (CTAs)

A CTA is a banner, an image, or simply a piece of text, that prompts users to take a specific action. For instance, Your CTA can tell users to learn more about an offer, sign up to your mailing list, or buy a product.

Now, you need to create a CTA for your mobile site that catches the eye of the user. Otherwise, it would defeat the entire purpose of placing the CTA.

But how to design an eye-catching CTA for such a limited screen space?

An easy tip would be to place your CTA above the fold where it's easily visible to the user. They would not have to scroll down in order to see it.

6. Create Simple Forms

Users almost never face a hard time filling a large form on a computer. This is because using a keyboard to enter information in a large form that's already displayed on a big desktop screen is extremely easy. But, on mobile devices, forms need to be shorter for the user to easily fill them. These forms also need to have large buttons and text fields for the user to comfortably fill the form.

Here are some best practices you can follow to offer a smooth form-filling experience to the visitors on your mobile website:

• Ask only for the first name and email address of a visitor if you want them to sign up to your mailing list.
• If you need to include more than two fields in your form, ensure you make them easy and quick to answer.

Tip: Use DashClicks' Forms app to create user-friendly forms for any kind of data collection.

7. Make It Easy for Users to Contact You

If a customer searches for your contact details, chances are they might be facing some kind of an issue or question. This means, they may already be somewhat frustrated or confused. So, ensure you make it extremely easy for users to get in touch with you while designing a mobile-friendly site.

Here's what you can do:

Place a chat icon at the bottom-right. Or, if you can't offer this, provide a contact form in a Contactā  link that a user can find in your menu. You can also link to a Facebook chatbot if you aren't able to go for any of these options.

8. Provide an Intuitive, Simple Search Feature

Your site's search feature is relatively more important to mobile users. To make it seamless for mobile users to carry out a search, make sure you put in place an intuitive, simple search feature. For this, ensure you position it front-and-center for your users to quickly spot it. This is one of the most important mobile website design tips to follow for providing a great user experience to visitors on your mobile site.

9. Use Simple Menus

Desktop website menus have plenty of space. They can take up a complete bar at the screen's top. And the good thing is that it never hurts the user experience. But when it comes to smartphones, you just don't have that much space.

But then how to design menus for mobile sites?

We recommend that you use simple menus that show your website's overview. You can then add the search feature, filters, and categories to help users find what they are searching for.

You can even use the hamburger symbol that's used in the example below:

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This symbol comprises two or three horizontal lines, signaling that a menu is present. This menu can then show large buttons and text upon opening.

How Do You Know if a Website Is Mobile-Friendly?

If you are wondering whether your existing website is mobile-friendly, you can run a test to know for sure.

To do so, we recommend that you use Google's mobile-friendly test tool. All you need to do to use the tool is input your website link and click Test URL.ā

About DashClicks' Sites App

If you wish to build an attractive, mobile-friendly site for your agency, you can use DashClicks' Sites app. The website builder software lets you access different site views including mobile, desktop, and tablet at all times. This will help you provide a quality UX to your potential customers, regardless of the device they use.

Here are some more features of the Sites app:

• Select the template of your choice and get your new custom site built within a matter of seconds.
• You can use the app to create, manage, and optimize your site, no tech experience required.
• You can access exhaustive website analytics to see the stats of your site and know how it is performing.
• Sites include hosting that is done on AWS and an SSL certificate to ensure your site is protected.

Wrapping It Up

A mobile-friendly site is created to work well both on tablets and smartphones. From creating eye-catching CTAs to using text that fits perfectly on the small screen of a mobile, there are many mobile website design tips you can follow. Another way to deliver a sound user experience is to create a mobile app for your business. AppMySite's mobile app maker enables you to build an app in minutes without writing a single line of code.

Now that you know what a mobile-friendly website is and how to create one, you can begin building your site with confidence knowing that you will provide only the best experience to your potential buyers if they visit your mobile site. Good luck!