Tips for Making Your Website Work on Mobile Devices
Is Your Band Site Mobile Friendly?
Every year more & more people use a mobile device to find things on-line. If your website is not up to the job then you could lose out on these potential clients as they look elsewhere for what they need.
There are just two things required
to make a web site mobile friendly - size and speed.
Size
One pet hate for mobile users is needing to scroll from left to
right to read content. The solution is to develop a responsive
template site that will re-size to fit any viewport.
There
are 1,000s of templates available on-line (many of them free) and they
come complete with all the necessary coding to make the site flexible to
any device.
Most users would also have a data limit each month so the bandwidth of
the pages needs to be minimised. The biggest areas for improvement are
videos (see below), pictures (make sure they
are optimised for the web and are not still at 1Mb+) and excessive (&
sometimes unnecessary) coding. Tackling these issues will also help to
improve....
Speed
20 seconds is a long
time to wait for a web page to load. Even after 10 seconds many would
give up and go elsewhere.
So what can you do to improve things?
Let’s
start with the hardest one which can also have the biggest impact. If
you use WordPress, Joomla or a similar CMS based software to build your
site then it does come with 1,000s (& 1,000s) of lines of code which are
probably not required for your application but have to be downloaded
anyway. A recent speed check on a simple site built with WordPress
revealed it had a mobile score of 1/100 (more on speed tests later). The
easiest solution is not to use CMS but instead build your site from the
ground up with a template package which uses minimal coding to work.
Videos are a great way to show off your talents and changing these
to 'lazy-load' can make a huge difference to the speed of your pages
(see our video page to find out what this is all about - link is at the
bottom)
Pictures on a web site should be saved at 72dpi and at
the size that they will appear on the site. With software such as Adobe
you can resize an image and optimise it for the web in just a few
seconds.
Are you up to speed?
The proof
of how good your site is for mobile users can be found at:
Mobile Friendly - https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly
Mobile Speed -
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
As an
added incentive to improve your site for mobile users, Google have a
mobile search results algorithm which excludes sites that are not mobile
friendly and it also takes into account the loading speed of the site
for ranking.
Website Design Service - if you need a new website
check out MetaHost
For advice on
adding videos to your site click here.
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