7 Ways How To Make Your WordPress site Mobile Friendly

As the number of mobile users has increasingly superseded over the last decade, businesses need to be extra careful in designing their websites, to make sure that the design and layout is mobile friendly. Failing to do so might cause their website views to turn out drastically lower than expected, as most of the people browsing the Internet from mobile will not be able to either find them online, or conveniently read through their content.

It is no more like the olden days when a business could just set up a desktop-based website to create its virtual presence and spread it across the world. As indicated in various research papers and essays from professional writers from Edubirdie UK, and others, Google switched to a mobile-first index in 2018, which means Google search results now appear with higher preference websites that are optimized for mobile.

This change in trends has arisen partly due the constant technological advancement of smart phones, and partly out of the rising popularity of mobile apps. To cater to this successfully, not only business owners but also the web developers who do not want to be left behind are pressured, as they need to develop the skills to optimize desktop-based websites for mobile use, as well as develop new websites with the kind of code that leaves scope for mobile optimization to be done easily.

If your website was built at a time when mobile use was not as common as it is today, you can get its layout (and perhaps the code) revised through the following simple ways, in order to make it suitable to be browsed from a mobile phone.

Use an appropriate ratio of text to pictures

When a website is opened from desktop, its content is visible to the user in larger size as compared to opening it from a mobile phone, due to the larger sized screens of desktop computers. Hence it is relatively easier to read long paragraphs of text. On the smaller mobile screens, users might find it difficult to go through too much of text, as it will appear congested, dull and tiny. The solution to this is to increase the ratio of pictures or graphics to text, in order to make the webpages mobile-friendly.

When somebody opens up a website from mobile, they are not necessarily in the mindset of gaining knowledge or learning something new. They might just be having their leisure time and looking for something fun on the Internet. It is, therefore, crucial to add elements in the mobile content that can entertain them in order to get your message across.

It is a good idea to convert paragraphs into bullet points, and purely text points into info-graphics, to add colors and shapes to your content. Technical writers in custom writings reviews support this idea, since it prevents users from getting bogged out or feeling like a burden to read too many words.

Make the website responsive

Having a website that’s mobile-friendly allows it to be viewed from any location, any situation or any mood a user is in. This is why consumers nowadays are more likely to make instant decisions to contact a business or make a purchase directly from a website, if they find something valuable on the website for themselves.

For instance, a user who is looking for a hand-operated food chopper on an urgent basis, if finds it on sale on a website, would like to make an instant online purchase for it, rather than going out to the shop to look for it and buy. But for that to happen, the website that is selling the product must have clear directions and buttons to guide the user through the purchase process. If it takes the user too long to figure out how to make the online purchase of his selected product, he might get fed up and back off from it to go and buy the exact same thing from someone else’s site.

Making your website more responsive also makes it easier for you to gather effective feedback from users, without making them feel annoyed. Instead of creating the same old and boring comment box to collect feedback, you can turn the page into a fun and easy-going, responsive quiz where users are appreciated or praised every time they answer a question about your products or services. These kinds of quizzes are also easier for users to participate in from their mobile phones, when they are usually not in a very serious mood.

Make the buttons more prominent

To optimize a website designed for desktop for mobile use, a major change that needs to be made is changing the location, size and design of all its buttons that are connecting all the pages of the website to each other.

Buttons on a site are not as easily visible from mobile screens as they are on desktop screens, probably because the menu bar is not as easily accessible in mobile versions. Hence all buttons need to be made larger, more centralized, and put into brighter colors so that they are not skipped.

You might even want to add in more buttons overall for the mobile version, to give multiple pathways to users for going from one page to another.

Use proper spacing in the text

To avoid giving the write-up on your site a crammed look, you might want to increase the line spacing and side margins for the mobile version. Using larger font sizes also helps.

The point is, at the very first glimpse, the content on your site must appear easy and light to read, so that users can read it in any mood from their mobile, even if they are mentally exhausted after a long day and are just browsing through the Internet to cool off their mind.

Include the viewport meta tag

A viewport meta tag controls the way your website opens up on a mobile device. Those familiar with the basic coding languages used in websites would know that without a viewport meta tag, your website pages would be rendered at typical desktop screen widths first, to be scaled for mobile screens later. This not only increases the loading time of your webpages, but also doesn’t provide an optimum content width for viewing from mobile.

The viewport meta tag instructs browsers to fit the width of your webpages directly to the screen of the device of the user. This gives flexibility for users to be able to visit your website from any kind of mobile device that they have.

Reduce the site loading time

It is common for users nowadays to end up on websites directly from social media apps, if someone in their contact list happens to share about your site on their social media newsfeed. To grab the attention of such users, before they close the browser that just mistakenly opened on their phone screen, it is fundamental for your site to have super loading speed.

Besides including a viewport meta tag, there are other measures that can be taken to reduce the loading time of your site on mobile. Anything that takes up a lot of space, including all high-resolution images and CSS, should be compressed, and heavy graphics or video clips should be avoided. Compressing images and graphics is a good idea because it doesn’t affect their quality, but decreases the space that they occupy.

Allow an easy way to switch to desktop view

Some of your mobile visitors might want to visit your website from desktop at a later time. This means they are already hooked onto the products or services that you’re selling, and want to learn more when they have more time and the mood to sink into it.

If so, you need to make sure to include a direction on your mobile version to take users to the desktop version right away. Regularly testing this feature to check the loading time for conversion from mobile to desktop version is a good notion.

We know that mobile devices keep changing as new trends and innovations show up in the market every few months or so. Hence, even after you make your site totally mobile friendly for the users of today, it wouldn’t mean that your job is done forever. You would need to constantly keep on testing and updating your website design to keep it up-to-date with the changing tastes and lifestyles of your users and their mobile phones.

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