Things to Consider Before Designing a Mobile Website

A recent survey by AdWeek says the time spent on mobiles or smartphones is increased by 88%. People expect a website to load quickly no matter how the connectivity is or where they are, and mobile-focused websites fulfil this expectation. So, making the websites mobile-friendly has become important for businesses. To achieve this, some design aspects and User Experience Metrics must be taken into consideration.

When a website is viewed on the small screen of a mobile, it is important to make sure its content is easily readable. Being 'small in size' has two contexts, crucial for a web page to be easily readable.

Physically Smaller 
A phone is about 3-5 diagonal inches, with some larger phones upto 6 inches, and 9-12 diagonal inches of a tablet. This is a very small size when compared to a notebook screen of 13-17 inches, and a desktop of 20-30 inches.

Less Pixels
An iPhone 6s retina display is 1334 x 750 pixels, whereas the smallest-screen MacBook has a 2304 x 1440 display.

The cellular network speed is continuously improving every day. However, their download rates are depreciating. So, it is essential to ensure that your site has enhanced bandwidth efficiency, since every second that users are made to wait for pages to load, increases their frustration and dissatisfaction.

According to Google, more than half of the users abandon a website if it takes more time than 3 seconds to load on a mobile. Creating a mobile friendly site of your business can be a way out. You can have crisp content and self-explanatory visuals that would load faster on the mobile phones. This would make users stay longer on your site, benefiting the time-on-site.

While a desktop website needs to be surfed with the help of a mouse and the keyboard, mobile websites can be swiped or tapped through, only by a touch. This makes viewing easy and quick. The websites accessed on mobile phones are sure to get more traffic as people are now always on the internet with their phones, in between their busy schedule.

Businesses now need to have a mobile website, designed in a way that the customers get what they want in that short span of time between the busy schedules. The content quality and visuals incorporated in the website need to be highly appealing, which would help improve user-engagement by capturing user-attention.

As per a 2017 report of BrightEdge, 51% of customers say that they use mobile devices to discover new brands, products or foods or restaurants.

Going with this percentage, one may conclude that mobile phones largely affect the time span a person puts into internet surfing. The viewer can surf more instinctively on a mobile phone, with more ease. He might easily tap through the website pages and also visit the other links, if they load faster.

Google introduced the AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) project in February 2016. Web Stories (earlier known as AMP Stories), a cutting-edge storytelling format created as a part of this project, are sure to soon become inevitable for businesses. Reason? they enthral users in visually engaging, fast-loading and full-screen content. To add more, they are platform independent. Hence your website content can be easily shared across various platforms and reach out to a wider audience.

Using the Web Story Builder, you can easily create Web Stories on your website to get better ranking and with enhanced User Experience, eventually pull in more traffic to your website.