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If your website isn't mobile-friendly, it won't rank highly on Google searches and draw in consumers.
Businesses today employ various mobile device marketing strategies and understand that their customers may opt to buy immediately from their smartphones. They need a mobile-friendly website to create a seamless experience.
A mobile-friendly website isn’t just a way to improve the customer experience. In 2015, Google started requiring web pages to be optimized for mobile use to rank well in mobile search results. Here’s how to ensure your website is accessible on mobile platforms so that you can please customers and search engines while boosting your brand image and sales.
If your website is unprepared for mobile-first indexing by Google and other search engines, it will have serious ranking problems. No matter how stylish and fabulous your landing page is, it means little if it’s not optimized for mobile. So, how do you convert a website to a mobile-friendly format?
Reorganizing your desktop content elements into mobile-friendly versions will create a mobile version of your site. You’ll deliver a responsive website that matches the desktop version. Follow these steps to create this new website design.
When choosing a website template or theme, look for a mobile-responsive option. E-commerce website builders, such as Squarespace or Wix, have easy-to-customize, mobile-responsive themes. You can also find mobile-responsive themes using WordPress via its content management system or by searching Google for “responsive theme + WordPress.”
If your current website theme is nonresponsive and doesn’t have a mobile-friendly option, try adding the following code to the <head> tag of your website pages:
<meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0″>
Try this code on a few pages to see if it changes the width of your web pages automatically to match the smart device being used. If not, or if you have a complex website with many separate pages, you may consider updating your template to be mobile-friendly.
Once your site is mobile-friendly, you must tweak your main page (and subsequent pages) by removing excess content. For example, if you run a salon, your mobile site’s main page should have a simplified form to make an appointment. Other information, such as services, prices and gallery photos, should be on separate pages to avoid conflict with the primary form.
On a desktop website, several photos, text or forms on one page may be fine but more information is needed to ensure visitors complete the primary task on a smart device. A simplified main page should emphasize the most important call to action to convert viewers.
Page-load speed is crucial in the mobile realm. The faster your mobile-friendly website can load, the better. To embed videos, host them on a third-party site, compress images and dial down custom Cascading Style Sheets code. Slow websites don’t score as well in search engine results pages, which means your competitors can rank higher than you on platforms like Google.
People use touch on mobile devices to select buttons and links. Using thumbs instead of a mouse can create unique challenges when designing a mobile-friendly website. These tips and tricks will help:
A mobile-friendly website, also called a “responsive” or “mobile-compatible” website, is easy to view, use and navigate on a smartphone or tablet. As people gravitate toward their smartphone or tablet for convenience and portability, they tend to favor mobile-friendly websites that adapt to touch controls and smaller screen sizes.
A responsive, mobile-friendly website reduces friction on e-commerce websites for users. These websites are accessible via the same address as their desktop site and include the same content. However, they adjust to the reader’s device, providing an uninterrupted UX.
In 2023, Google shut down its popular Mobile Usability report and Mobile Friendly test, which gauged the usability of sites for mobile devices. These tools didn’t check for crucial factors like page load speeds, SEO, accessibility and the overall quality of online interactions for consumers.
Google recommends developers and website owners use Chrome’s Lighthouse tool to check for mobile-friendliness and other website factors. This tool aims to improve the overall quality of web pages, including ensuring ease of use on mobile devices. Google also recommends adhering to Core Web Vitals metrics to ensure a great UX.
Mobile-friendly websites bring several benefits that support and enhance your business’s success:
Beyond creating a seamless customer experience and ranking highly on Google, optimizing your website for mobile is essential for the following reasons:
Mobile websites and mobile apps differ. Mobile-friendly websites consist of web pages users can access via any browser; the website adjusts to the device it’s being viewed on automatically, so the mobile experience is perfect. In contrast, a mobile app is custom software users can download to their mobile devices from various marketplaces, such as Apple’s App Store and Google Play.
Pros and cons of mobile-friendly websites
Pros and cons of mobile apps
Not every business needs a mobile app and a mobile-friendly website. But, at the very least, investing in a mobile-friendly website is vital to your business’s growth and sustainability.
Mobile-first indexing benefits webmasters, marketers and consumers by incentivizing businesses to create high-quality mobile web experiences. Updating your website to ensure mobile-friendliness will encourage site visitors to return, shop, purchase and share your mobile website with others. An updated website eliminates friction and can increase your company’s conversions and profits. It’s a win all around.
Alexandra Tachalova contributed to this article.