How to Make Websites Mobile-Friendly [2024 Guide]

Did you know that to have better SEO results, you need to have a mobile-friendly website? Mobile-friendly websites enhance user experience, which leads to conversion. This article addresses how to make websites mobile-friendly.

What Does Mobile–Friendly Mean?

When a desktop site gets small enough to fit onto your mobile device—a mini version of the official form—and is effortlessly usable, it’s then mobile-friendly. Today’s smartphone users do more than browse, entertain, or shop.

A good reason to make your website mobile-friendly is the number of mobile phones worldwide, which will reach 4.88 billion in 2021. Additionally, smartphones account for about half of the international web traffic. In Q1 2021, mobile phones generated 54.8% of global website traffic.

Since 2018, Google has prioritized mobile homepage load speed as a crucial measuring tool when deciding a website’s search engine rankings.

Is Your Website Mobile-Friendly?

The following are several test methods to know if you have a mobile-friendly website design.

• Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a test tool that empowers companies and website owners to find how mobile responsive your site is. It works by typing your URL into the bar and then measures how simple it is for users to access and navigate the site from their mobile devices. In addition, it gives you valuable tips on how to improve in this field.

To obtain a favorable report, your site needs to attain fast mobile loading speeds, as well as loading time covering a broad spectrum of devices and signal conditions.

• Google’s PageSpeed Insights

Another way to view if your mobile version of a website is responsive is to use the PageSpeed Insights by Google. When you start the analysis, this tool will show you plenty of data about your site. It works by giving you screenshots of how it works on mobile and desktop view and gives you a score of the loading speed on your mobile device. Moreover, it informs you on what should be fixed and what has been done correctly.

• W3C’s MobileOK Checker

With this tool, you can see if your website has any usual errors, image or graphic problems, troubles with resource size, or HTTP errors. With W3C’s MobileOK Checker, you can identify issues in pop-ups, the viability of SSL certificates, and so on. It can also give you proper recommendations on how to make the WordPress site mobile-friendly, as well as any other site.

How to Make Websites Mobile–Friendly

It’s important for your site to be adaptive to mobile design. But how is this done?

Consider these six tips:

• Craft Site for Responsive Web Design

Crafting your site helps users connect to your content more straightforward and share it. As a result, you will not need as much time to sustain more pages for the same content, and the probability of frequent mistakes can be significantly reduced. It also retains some resources when Googlebot collects data from your site and helps its algorithms assign the exact indexing values to your page. This is done by:

• Using a Responsive Theme

Responsive themes polish functionality on each screen size and device and are an excellent tool for building a mobile-first website.

• Responsive themes tend to adjust to your web content and media automatically when displayed, conforming to your device’s screen size. For this reason, it’s excellent to choose WordPress, with free and paid themes.
• Regardless of the theme you use, you need to check for updates regularly because sometimes those updates contain mobile-friendly components, which you might need to make your site more responsive.

• Using a Simple Theme

When browsing on your smartphone screen,  you probably prefer simple designs with an easily readable menu, minimalist design, and an overall smooth mobile experience.

This approach is practical since large and complex themes and the content decelerate the speed of your mobile device. This is excellent advice on how to achieve mobile responsiveness. Simple designs also attract visitor’s attention.

• Improve Website Speed

There are a few ways as to how to create a speedy mobile website.

• Compress Images and CSS

You should focus on shortening the file size of the uploaded high-resolution images but try to make them look clear on any screen size.

This is essential because most people have less usable bandwidth on their phones but still visit the website. Consequently, if the image is too big, the loading time is much longer and agitates your website viewers.

A  responsive website means you have to offer a superb user experience—loading time is a considerable part of that. When you shrink the images’ file size, the users get quicker loading times and use less data.

Make the website mobile-friendly-free by compressing the complicated CSS scripts, which is done by testing and identifying those scripts and compressing them via the developer tools accessible in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc.

Try experimenting with different formats to find the sweet spot between quality and size to be on the safe side.

• Use AMP (accelerated mobile pages)

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs) is a non-proprietary project based on coding, created by Google to assist your mobile devices to load websites faster.

AMP functions by getting pages down to their most vital segments and allowing Google servers to keep cached forms from them, which helps the content distribution to be made instantly.

With this, you’ll be able to make a website mobile-friendly with CSS in a streamlined version. The content for ads and videos is extracted, and only essential images and information are displayed. You achieve excellent loading time with this stripping of complicated elements.

By rendering your webpage with enhanced HTML code, it loads quicker due to the termination of the HTML tag manager exposure, which clogs the speed of the page.

• Remove Ads and Pop-ups

Loading speed is often slower on phones than on desktops. Therefore, you should optimize (or remove) ads and pop-ups and decrease their impact on speed. If you don’t want to cut them out, at least make them less annoying—visitors will appreciate it.

Additionally, lazy loading is another excellent solution on how to make a website mobile-friendly. It delays the slow-loading parts of the page—such as ads or images—and they continue when the page is fully loaded. So your visitors open it quickly, and, as they scroll down, the lazy loading makes sure the images are loaded as needed.

• Avoid Mobile Optimization Mistakes

Your mobile site should be lined up the same as your desktop site version; otherwise, something is missing between the two. The Googlebot will crawl your website like any other user. If your CSS, JavaScript, and images have restricted access, it could damage your rankings.

To bypass this, check the Google Search Console, find the website file named robots.txt, and see if some elements are dismissed.

Ensure you have done everything correctly with Google Fetch and that you have no mobile-first indexing problems, thereby knowing your webpage has a mobile-friendly design.

And be cautious of bad backlinks on your website, which are used by low-authority, suspicious websites. Try to remove these irrelevant links.

When you upload videos or other media, think about how it will influence your website speed and if the video can be played on mobile devices. It’s also wise to put a transcript on the media file because it helps Google for better indexing.

Key Takeaways 

• Appropriate Fonts and Buttons

How to make an existing website mobile-friendly is to optimize the appearance of the fonts and buttons.

• Fonts

Even though today’s mobile screens are relatively big and sometimes reminiscent of a small tablet, they are still limited. So font sizes and button sizes matter when you read the content on your phone. It’s inefficient to use small fonts on a mobile screen. It takes more time to read and can damage your eyes, while big ones take up too much space and interrupt reading coherence.

• Styles

The style of those words is also essential. Imagine the font styles as word attire. Each font—with a distinctive look—means that it serves a unique purpose.

You can create a profound user experience with the collaboration of fonts, buttons, and design. So when building a mobile website—with paid or website builders which are free—choose your fonts wisely. For example, you don’t want to put a graffiti font on a restaurant page.

• Mobile SEO Best Practices

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an essential practice if you want to shape a mobile-responsive webpage. Such methods should include:

• No Heavy Pages

The fewer ads, videos, or heavy images you upload to your website, the quicker it loads. This is a simple but very effective SEO tactic—decrease heavy material without losing quality so that you can achieve mobile-friendly website design.

• Code in HTML5

Lightweight browsing is achievable by adding two HTML files to your additional content. Since this content is additional (e.g., it’s not used for buying the product) and involves more images, you shouldn’t load it just to keep the starting page size down. The content is automatically accessible on the page by links, even if some level of JavaScript backing is present. You load the information afterward when the user demands it. This is yet another solution as to how to make my website mobile-friendly.

• Content Should Fit the Screen

A web page needs to be arranged and scaled to adapt to the display size of a tablet or mobile device. Today, phones have top-notch high display resolutions, and, therefore, their pixels are much denser than those on desktop screens.

It’s crucial then to layout a page to blend with the screen diameter in the mobile-independent pixels. This is addressed at the head of the HTML meta viewport tag.

• Easy to Navigate

If you wish to convert your website to mobile-friendly, free of charge, make it easy to navigate. With well-categorized content and organized navigation, you can have an efficient guideline to steer visitors to your site’s multiple pages and content.

This is a significant reason for visitors to linger and enhance your website traffic, digest your content, and have an excellent overall user experience, which always leads to more sales and client loyalty.

• Make Site Search Simple to Use

Smaller screens and virtual keyboards make the phone-search design more complicated. Consider these excellent mobile UX practices to create a great search bar:

• A full-width search bar is typically placed on the main screen to give you access to the feature immediately. If your site or product needs to provide users easy entry to a lot of content, then this is a great option to convert a website to mobile-friendly.
• A smaller tab bar is a suitable solution if the search function is not the central pillar for the user experience. Users can find access to the searching option, no matter where they are on your site at that moment.
• The contextual icon for searching (e.g., the magnifying glass) is a flexible method. You need to display the icon in the segment of the site which is most suitable for searching.

• Place Links Far Apart to Avoid Accidental Tapping

Because some phones have smaller screens—and some people with large fingers—it’s an excellent strategy to place links far apart to avoid unintentional tapping.

How to create a mobile-friendly website? It’s helpful to craft larger targets that are spaced out from one another to prevent coincidental tapping on unwanted links.

The average finger pad is about 3/8 inch (10mm) on the surface. So Google suggests a minimum of 48 pixels of tap target.

To explain what an image represents, you should use Alt tags. One of the goals of Alt tags is to serve visually challenged users who use display readers while they’re searching. Those who have text-only browsers also use these tags for surfing.

Alt tags are also utilized in SEOs as an answer on how to make WordPress mobile-friendly. Alt tags play a valuable role when search engines connect the images with the page’s content and index the page within their search results accurately.

• Mobile-Focused Keyword Research

Logically, shorter keywords are often used with mobile searches. Everyone does it since it’s much easier to use the minimum number of characters to get what you look for.

So, consequently, if you wish to get a better ranking on mobile devices, design shorter keywords.

How to make a website look the same on a mobile phone is simple. Use all the above-listed tips, and check mobile friendliness regularly because the SEO sphere is ever-increasingly expanding.

Conclusion

Achieving good results in google page ranking can be a challenging mission, but this is where SEO practices come into play. With the above tips, you’ll have opportunities to reach the top ranking and create a mobile-friendly design on the web.