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1. Give Your Site A Responsive Layout & Mobile-Friendly Design
Your website looks cool and works like a charm on PC; that’s fantastic.
Have you tried opening it on a smartphone?
Does it look unusable on mobile?
Unfortunately, being PC-friendly doesn’t automatically make a website mobile-friendly as well. And because of Google’s mobile-first index, if your site is not mobile-friendly, it may never see the light of page 1 of the search engine results pages (SERPs).
So what do you do?
The first major step in making your site mobile-friendly is working on a responsive design. When a site is responsive, it displays properly on screens of all sizes.
How To Give Your Website A Mobile-First Design
There are two ways to upgrade your website into a mobile-friendly experience. Each solution has its own tradeoffs:
- The fastest way: Install a dedicated mobile-first plugin like WPtouch to give your website a responsive design in minutes. It’s the easiest method, but not without its risks; plugins are prone to breaking and even being hacked.
- The most reliable and secure way: Modify your website’s code to include responsive solutions.
How To Hand-Code A Responsive Website
If you want to transform your desktop site into a responsive, mobile-friendly website, you’ll need to incorporate:
- A viewport.
- Responsive images.
- A fluid layout.
- Media queries.
Back up your website before making changes to your code.
How To Set A Viewport On A Website
Viewports help each browser know how to adapt your webpage’s dimensions to its screen. Add this line of HTML code inside its <head>
tag to set the viewport on a page:
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"/>
How To Make Images Responsive
It’s important that your visitor does not have to scroll left and right to see the content of your website. Use the max-width property for images:
- Open your site’s stylesheet (the CSS file).
- Add “max-width: 100%” for the
<img/>
tag, like this:
img {
max-width: 100%;
}
How To Install A Fluid Layout
When you have a responsive layout, its page elements fit themselves to any screen.
Different fluid layout methods include:
-
Flexbox: Use this method when you have a number of differently-sized items and want to fit them in a row. Add the “display: flex” property to their HTML tag.
-
Multicol: This method splits your content into columns. It uses the column-count property.
- Grid: This method creates a grid to fit your elements inside.
How To Add Media Queries To Your Website
Media queries are another way to adapt your content to any screen size by accounting for features native to different devices.
There’s a lot to absorb, but once you’ve done everything, check how well it works by viewing your site on many different devices.
2. Make Your Full Website Look Good On Mobile
Step one covered the technical framework that makes your website fit well on mobile devices. With a responsive design, your site is almost fully mobile-friendly. Next, focus on:
- Large, easily readable text.
- Large interactive elements.
- Avoiding long paragraphs.
- Generous use of negative space.
- Room around links and interactive elements.
3. Don’t Block Your Content With Popups
Popups can result in high bounce rates. Use smaller popups and ensure they are easy to close.
4. Fix The Technical Errors On Your Website
Identify errors like broken links, unnecessary redirects, and faulty CSS or Javascript that can disrupt user experience. Use tools to scan for and fix these errors regularly.
5. Make Your Site Load Quickly
Enhance loading speed by optimizing images, enabling compression, using browser caching, implementing lazy loading, optimizing code, and merging elements.
6. Optimize Your Website For Local & Voice Search
Utilize location-based keywords, have an FAQ page with concise answers, display business information prominently, create a Google Business Profile, and collect positive customer reviews.
7. Make Your First Scroll Efficient
Ensure the initial view of your site captivates visitors with elements like a descriptive title, a navigation menu, a search bar, and a call-to-action.
8. Make Your Search Results Attractive
Enhance your search result appearance by using strong keywords, eye-catching titles and descriptions, and adding structured data for rich snippets.
Years ago, Google saw the potential in mobile devices, making the Internet much better. Ensure your site meets the gold standard to provide a great user experience across all devices. Start boosting your search rankings and user engagement with a responsive website today!