30 Nov 21 | 15:48:13
Most of the time, websites are built on computers with large monitors to provide the best view, so it’s easy to forget that many visitors will be using a mobile instead of a desktop.
Not only does this mean that they’re viewing the site on a much smaller screen, but also the way the website loads and how users can interact with it is different.
Considering that there are now 6.8 billion smartphones worldwide (in 2023) and 59% of global internet traffic was via mobile, making sure your website is mobile-friendly has never been more important. These numbers are climbing each year.
We’re going to dive into mobile optimisation and let you know the issues you should avoid if you want your website to perform well and provide your customers with a good user experience, which results in a higher ranking on Google.
You may find that most of your traffic comes from desktop traffic, but even if this is the case, it’s still important to ensure that you have a mobile-friendly website for two reasons.
A non-optimised site can cause many problems. It can become tricky to navigate and read, pages can load slowly, and altogether it can be a very disappointing experience. All your hard work in building a great-looking website would be wasted.
Bad optimisation can also lead to poor performance on your website. When users cannot find exactly what they’re looking for or can’t read the copy on the page, they are likely to leave.
As a result, you’re likely to see your mobile bounce rate (the percentage of users who leave a site after viewing only one page) climb and your conversions (when users perform a desired action) drop.
It’s worth noting that 50% of online purchases are made via mobile device. Although this may not be as relevant to the Medical Device industry, it demonstrates how customers have become accustomed to doing everything via their phone that they can do on a desktop.
If your website is not performing well for you by bringing in new customers, it can’t help you achieve your business goals, hence why taking the time to optimise it is so important.
Search engines are basically just looking to provide the best, most relevant results for the user, meaning websites are ranked based on how good the user experience is. They use many different factors to determine this.
One factor that has been gaining traction in recent years is mobile optimisation. As more and more people use their smartphone to search the internet, search engines need to ensure that websites are built to be mobile-friendly.
If a website has a significantly high bounce rate on mobile devices as opposed to desktops, it indicates that there might be a problem with the way the website is displayed on mobiles. Consequently, search engines will not rank these websites as high because they don’t provide as good a user experience.
Why is any of this important? Well, ranking higher will probably lead to more traffic on your website as people tend to trust search engines to display the best results for them and are therefore more likely to select the highest results.
If you would like to learn more about how search engines rank websites, see our medical device SEO guide.
As such, some features are available on desktops that aren’t available on mobile phones, and of course, due to the size of phone screens, the layout of the web page can often end up being very different to what it is on a desktop monitor.
We have covered some of the things that you need to consider when optimising your website for use on mobiles.
It might sound obvious, but mobile users will be navigating with their fingers instead of a mouse or trackpad. This means that when a user is trying to click something on a page, the surface area that they end up clicking is much larger than with a mouse, meaning it’s less accurate.
This can make clicking links and buttons difficult if they’re not formatted correctly. You’ll need to ensure that links are spaced apart, so that people don’t accidentally end up clicking on more than one link at once. It should be easy for them to click the exact link they want. Furthermore, you need to ensure buttons are spaced apart and big enough to read and click on.
This is worth keeping in mind even when designing for desktop use as well, some users can still use a touchscreen to navigate a page. If a user cannot navigate properly, they’ll probably end up leaving your site and you might lose potential customers.
When building your website, you should try to include eye-catching images that break up the text, but problems can occur when images are made smaller to fit on a phone screen.
If the image is not high quality or closely cropped, the user may not be able to make out what is in the image, which can appear quite unprofessional. You need to make sure that you only use images where the quality won’t be affected when shrunk down.
Correctly formatting text can really improve user experience on your website as it makes large bodies of text, like blog articles, much easier to follow. This is especially prevalent for mobile users.
Long paragraphs of text are not good for mobile users as they’ll end up taking up the whole screen. The user may not realise there are other things on the page and navigate away because they don’t feel like reading lots of text. The user will also not appreciate having to scroll down through loads of text to get to the end of the page.
Keep paragraphs short and easy to read. Use pictures and line breaks to break up text, so that it’s more visually pleasing for users, and it doesn’t feel like there is an overwhelming amount of text.
It’s important to include calls-to-action in your text that are as noticeable as they on desktop, to encourage users to move through your site.
Flash files are used on websites to animate them and although it is being used less and less, some websites still have Flash features.
The problem with this software is not only that search engines cannot read it, but mobile phones don’t have Flash installed, so they can’t show Flash features. If you have lots of Flash features on your website, that means a large chunk of your website can’t be viewed by your potential customers.
Going through your website to check for Flash features is a great way to get started with optimising your website for mobile use.
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