Maintaining a strong online presence is no longer optional for modern businesses, and that stands regardless of industry. Some seize the opportunity to share information and build a community, while others take a more direct approach and build out an online marketplace. Whichever path you choose, you’ve got to ensure that your customer experience is mobile-friendly, as 60% of the world’s web traffic comes from mobiles. A robust mobile website design can help create a seamless experience for everyone.
There are some specific key elements you’ll have to honor when appealing to mobile devices, as they don’t perfectly replicate the desktop experience. Fortunately, you don’t have to go it alone, as comprehensive industry tools are ready at the helm.
Mobile Website Design Elements for a Seamless Experience
Smartphones and other mobile devices are incredibly powerful tools—they quite literally changed life as we knew it. Though sometimes aesthetically imperfect, they can mimic the functions of larger technology like laptops and computers. This is a game changer, especially since the increase in hybrid work has created a larger mobile workforce.
Through mobile devices, employees can resume productivity wherever they are. Nevertheless, the mobile experience differs in some ways because of the smaller screen. As a result, some optimization is necessary to ensure mobile users have a smooth experience when they visit your site.
You have probably been inconvenienced by desktop-centric websites failing to load properly on your 6-inch mobile device. Buttons can be too small to press, pop-ups can block important text, and large multimedia files cause pages to take forever to load. You can avoid your business’s mobile website falling victim to the same fate by following the following guidelines.
Responsive Mobile Website Design
Of course, eCommerce isn’t only about attracting site visitors—it’s also about convincing them to stay. Double down on the responsiveness of your mobile website design by making use of Responsive Web Applications.
A Responsive Web App uses a single code base, regardless of whether the user is on a PC or mobile device. Consequently, changes on one platform are immediately reflected in others. This is the easiest, most efficient way to ensure a seamless experience, with smooth transitions between shopping on PC, mobile, or even in physical stores.
The usefulness of this type of responsive design is particularly highlighted when comparing Responsive Web Applications to traditional mobile apps. Oftentimes, to make mobile sites easily accessible to customers, businesses will build mobile applications. This is certainly a great way to ensure that your content displays as intended, and also sidesteps compatibility issues.
But there are downsides to mobile-exclusive apps. Firstly, web designers have to craft various site layouts for different device screens. Perhaps more importantly, mobile applications make it harder to create a unified experience for customers. For example, if a customer earns loyalty points or begins an action on their PC, a truly holistic experience would ensure that they can complete said action on mobile. Keeping up this level of interconnectivity, however, relies on near-constant app updates.
Responsive Web Applications skirt around these problems, adapting fluidly to different screen sizes and resolutions and providing a seamless browsing experience. By employing flexible layouts, fluid images, and adaptive navigation, responsive design primes content for easy consumption and navigation, regardless of the device used.
This present an ideal solution for your web designers, as they don’t have to waste time on multiple site layouts; it’s also the best solution for your clients. According to research, having a non-responsive design is a reason why 73.1% of users leave a site.
With responsive design, businesses can effectively reach and engage their audience, enhancing user satisfaction and driving conversions. Thus, embracing these principles is fundamental to staying ahead in the ever-evolving mobile landscape and delivering exceptional user experiences.
Fast Loading Times
As the mobile workforce expands, having a fast and responsive mobile site is a must. This ensures that nobody loses productivity. In the modern world, technology has made most consumer goods and services available instantly. Anything that makes customers wait is a considerable inconvenience. As Forbes highlights, 53% of mobile users will abandon a website if it takes longer than three seconds to load.
Having users bail from your website is a huge problem, as it increases its bounce rate. This could cause it to be rated unfavorably by search engines. As a result, it will be less likely to appear at the top of search engine results.
Loading times can be reduced by compressing images and other media files that appear on the mobile webpage. You also need to partner with a good web host that has servers with satisfactory speeds.
Intuitive Navigation for Mobile Website Design
Mobile device usage isn’t a copy-paste of using traditional PCs. For starters, users swap a mouse for their fingertips. You need to keep this in mind when considering your mobile website design, as ultimately, what constitutes an intuitive design on PC will be different on mobile. To make navigation easier, consider adding features such as a search bar and a navigation bar to the top of your mobile site.
One of the best ways to improve navigation on your mobile site is to include easy-to-read drop-down navigation menus. The menu’s top level should contain only the most relevant categories.
When users press a category, it should reveal the submenus of subcategories. This organizational style ensures customers are never overwhelmed by all the content available. It also makes finding an article or product easier if everything is in the correct category.
User-Friendly Forms
You’ll sometimes need to collect information from users upon their site visit, such as when they want to sign up for newsletters or subscribe to a service.
To prepare for these instances, you’ll need to implement user-friendly forms. It needs to be convenient to fill in, and with as few hurdles as possible. This is especially important for eCommerce businesses whose websites are frequented by a mobile workforce.
Make your forms more user-friendly by enabling auto-fill and auto-correct, which saves customers the time and effort of typing out long addresses and names. As mobile devices typically have smaller screens, keeping all the items on the form in one column is also useful.
Lastly, avoid adding images and other media to the form if you can. More fluff just increases the chances that the form won’t be able to display correctly on a mobile device.
Accessibility Considerations
Furthermore, websites will naturally make assumptions about the user. These assumptions aren’t always true, which can result in a frustrating user experience. Catering to differently-abled users will make your mobile site stand out from the rest. What’s more, making your business inclusive isn’t just the profitable thing to do; it’s the morally right thing to do.
That being said, accessibility doesn’t start and end with catering to disabilities. It should also account for situational limitations, such as poor internet connection or language barriers.
A great tip to be more inclusive is to ensure that your site has sufficient contrast between the words and the background—think black words on a white backdrop. Moreover, avoid using too small of a font.
Some users may use screen readers, but this requires your site to be compatible with the latest browsers. Hence, make sure your mobile sites work with the latest versions of all browsers. Lastly, plugins that translate your webpage to other languages can help bridge the language gap.
Performance Optimization for Mobile Website Design
Ensuring your eCommerce website performs ideally on mobile devices is an ongoing process. You need to stay abreast of the latest trends in the mobile workforce and ensure your website is reacting to them favorably.
You also need to be looking at your content to see if you can further optimize it to improve performance. Doing so will boost loading times, giving users an overall smoother experience.
Are all the images compressed? Have you minimized the number of ads that appear? Has the coding been minified? These are questions your web programmers should be constantly asking. Keeping a mobile website design as simple as possible is also a good strategy to optimize performance. When fewer images and other media are used, pages can load faster.
Boost Your Mobile Website Design With Mobiecom
As we enter the year 2023, ensuring a seamless mobile browsing experience has become more critical than ever. With the rising dominance of mobile devices in online transactions, businesses must prioritize mobile website design to capture and retain customers effectively.
Optimizing your eCommerce website for mobile devices and accessibility isn’t easy—but it must be done to stay competitive in the modern marketplace. As discussed, fast loading times, intuitive mobile website design, and site layout are mission-critical to doing just that; this is where Mobiecom can help.
Mobiecom offers an optimized customer experience through its lightweight, Single Page Application (SPA) eCommerce application. By emulating the performance of a mobile app and delivering instant touch responses, Mobiecom ensures fast-loading pages and effortless navigation.
Whether your customers access your store from their desktop, laptop, tablet, or smartphone, Mobiecom guarantees a consistent and user-friendly experience across all devices. Moreover, integrating Mobiecom with various popular commerce platforms using REST APIs enables the flexibility to mix and match microservices to meet your specific business needs.
To learn more about how Mobiecom can elevate your mobile website design in 2023, visit mobiecom.tech and unlock the potential of seamless user experiences across devices.
