Imagine navigating a website on your phone. First, the page takes ages to load. Then, the display runs out of the screen. You have to endlessly scroll sideways in both directions to read the text. Or there’s a pop-up and you can’t figure out how to shut it. Frustrating, isn’t it?
That is what a website not optimized for mobile looks like. If you care about keeping your readers, it’s not something you want happening with your website.
Why is it so important to make your website work well on mobile devices? What are the benefits of a mobile-friendly site? How can you as an author make your website a responsive one? These are some of the questions I’m going to delve into here.
What does mobile-friendly mean?
Mobile-friendly, mobile-optimized and responsive are words you will hear when you go looking for information on building a website.
Technically, these words mean different things but I’m going to use them interchangeably here. The bottomline is, your website has to work just as well on a smartphone or tablet as it does on a laptop or desktop. There can be no loss in readability or functionality when moving from one device to the other.
A mobile-friendly or responsive website will adjust its layout, image and text to fit the size of the screen it’s displayed on. If you open the same site on a smartphone, tablet, laptop or any other device, you should be able to view it easily without the layout appearing too large or small for the screen.
What are the benefits of a mobile-friendly website?
There is only one reason you need a website — to bring your audience to a place that they can explore with ease, find your offering, and say yes to it.
A responsive website will help you achieve this in various ways.
Mobile has overtaken the desktop as the preferred digital medium worldwide, steadily increasing its share every year. Most internet traffic, which includes searches, social media and ecommerce, is being directed through mobile devices. This means your audience is more likely to find and browse your website on their smartphone than a desktop or laptop.
A responsive website tends to have a simpler layout with straightforward navigation and smaller images. This will lead to faster load speeds, which will also enhance your readers’ ease of browsing irrespective of the platform.
Non-responsive websites become a huge obstacle in gaining new readers or keeping old ones. Readers are quite likely to decide it’s not worth the time and effort to read or engage with your content. According to Google’s John Mueller, you have only two seconds to convince them to stay before they shut that tab.
A fast-loading website will also enable better SEO ranking, as search engines like Google prioritize such websites. This will again lead to better visibility for you and, subsequently, more audience engagement.
How to ensure your website is responsive?
To check if your website is mobile-friendly, take Google’s mobile-friendly test.
If the test is negative, hire a web designer to fix the website for you.
If that’s not an option, then the easiest thing to do is change your website’s theme or template. These days, most themes are responsive.
You could do a couple of things to check this for yourself.
- First, of course, is to run your chosen theme through Google’s mobile-friendly test, like you did with your website.
- Alternatively, open the theme’s demo page, hold one edge of your browser window and gradually make it smaller. If the layout adjusts to the smaller sizes, the text is readable, and buttons and links are easily clickable, you can be assured that the theme has a mobile-optimized design.
- Another easy test to perform is comparing your website to a social media app that runs on your phone. Open any one of these apps and study it carefully.
See how painless it is to read text. There’s hardly any clutter. Buttons and links are nicely spaced out so clicking on them is effortless. Forms are uncomplicated, therefore easy to fill. Menus are simple. Images don’t take ages to load. Scrolling is comfortable and you scroll sideways only for an intended purpose, for example, to access a different feature or a page.
Now compare this app to the theme you’ve selected. That’s how you want your website to look and function.
Summing it up
Mobile-optimization is an essential ingredient in developing a website. All professional websites are responsive and accessible on smaller devices, especially smartphones. They can’t afford not to be. And neither can you.
Most people read on their mobile devices these days, whether it’s books, articles or other content. They judge the credibility of the author they follow based on, among other things, the quality of her website.
A responsive, and, therefore, efficient website will build trust. It will expose you to a wider audience and give you the opportunity to expand your reader base. By not paying attention to the mobile-friendliness of your website, you are missing out on that opportunity.