We live in the era of smartphones, and today your device has turned from a simple means of communication into a multifunctional thing. Using the internet, you can search for information, buy clothes, order pizza, or rent a car for your trip.
Note: The best Magento hosting providers will help your business provide a flawless online shopping experience for your customers.
Indeed, it’s very easy to book a pickup truck rental Orlando or elsewhere directly from your smartphone. However, the most important thing is that the car rental website is perfectly mobile-optimized.
But why do so many people choose to go online through their smartphones? The answer is simple – they make it easy to use the Internet anytime and anywhere. So, having a smartphone-optimized web resource automatically opens the door to a larger audience.
In fact, 70% of internet traffic today comes from smartphones. In addition, 51% of users confirmed they regularly use mobile devices to find new brands and products. This number proves that optimizing a site for portable devices is as important to a business as expanding it.
In case your goal is creating a site for smartphones or adapting it for small screen devices, there are several possible ways to do this…
Stick to the ‘Mobile First’ Approach
When starting to develop a website, most designers focus on large-screen devices such as a PC or laptop. This is wrong, as in the future certain difficulties may arise when trying to optimize a site for a phone.
It’s much better to start with a small-screen design. Try to create a beautiful, fully-usable web resource for smartphone customers first, and then move on to a larger screen. Optimizing a site for a smaller screen, such as a smartphone or tablet, is much more difficult than for a large screen. Therefore, it makes more sense to start with the portable version.
Create a portable-friendly version
Do you have a good desktop site? It’s time to convert it to a smartphone-friendly form. Fortunately, there are at least two very good ways to do it: by using an online service or with CMS plugins. Which one to choose depends on the website’s software platform and your web programming skills.
Install a responsive theme
This is an important step towards making a quick smartphone-friendly site. The fast theme lets your mobile site load as instantly as it does on your PC. There are many responsive WordPress themes out there today. Many of them are paid, but they really do the job.
For example, Avada is one of the fastest and most responsive WordPress themes. With its simple design, a website loading speed on pocket devices won’t exceed a second. We recommend using special software to ensure that the chosen theme loads quickly and adapts greatly to the small screen.
Never Use Flash
Many web developers have given up on Flash because the technology consumes too many hardware resources. As a result, it can slow down page response and increase page load times. Plus, Flash can hurt SEO.
It’s also important to note that neither Android nor iOS supports Flash, so using this software is not the best solution if you want to create a website optimized for mobile devices.
Maintain your site loading speed
The site speed depends greatly on the server quality and hosting you use. So, it’s important to use fast and reliable hosting if you want to create a fast smartphone-optimized web resource. For best performance, we recommend cloud or VPS hosting. This solution will provide a faster server response, which is the most important factor in website loading speed. Further to mobile optimization, using a reliable super-fast web hosting service is vital for any website. So make sure to get hosting from a good host.
Optimizing the home page is another thing you should do in order to speed up your site. Check out several tips regarding this:
- Minimize the number of posts on the main page.
- Disable unnecessary plugins and widgets.
Pay attention to how your site looks
The first 15 seconds is the time you need to decide whether to stay on or leave the website. Therefore, you need to make a good impression as quickly as possible. If the content attracts traffic, then the appearance of the site makes people stay on it for more than 15 seconds.
So, first of all, disable the autocomplete form for the login page, use large buttons and fonts, and optimize pop-ups for portable devices. Also, use a dedicated mobile site optimization checker.
Benefit from Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
AMP is one of Google’s projects. Its goal is to speed up website loading by compressing page data by 8 times. This technology promises to quadruple your site’s speed, which in turn will make it faster and more smartphone-friendly.
Such leading companies as Twitter, The New York Times, and Adobe AMP widely use the AMP. Here’re some reasons why it’s so popular:
- It accelerates information loading on mobile devices;
- It makes a site more optimized for search engines;
- It boosts server performance.
Well, if you want to be successful online, you need to adapt to the latest technology. Considering the number of smartphone users, site optimization should be a priority. Naturally, this requires quite a lot of effort, but the results of your work will pay off faster than you think.