Mobile-friendly Focus

Competition for customer attention is tough and it’s imperative that every experience and interaction with your company is positive. Websites are a crucial part of this and the ability of your website to perform on mobile is increasingly important. Not only has mobile overtaken desktop in terms of search traffic, but shrewd consumers are scrolling to research and voting with their thumbs to review purchases and service. The whole process needs to be seamless.

In a move that aims to improve the user experience for an ever-growing number of mobile users, Google announced in June that it’s now rolling out mobile-first indexing. This means Google will use the content available on the mobile version of your website to determine your ranking.

Do you need to worry?

You might have spotted we frequently mention mobile-first web design in our Projects portfolio. Sites that download quickly onto mobile and resize to work well on all devices have been key to the design and build of slick websites for a while.

If your site is already responsive you don’t really have a reason to be concerned. However, if you don’t have a mobile version of your site, you’ll have to start addressing this soon to avoid poor ranking performance.

Here’s Google’s nifty tool to find out if your web page is mobile friendly: Mobile testing tool – a great way to identify any issues.

Above: We recently launched oktra.co.uk

What if your site is already mobile-friendly?

If you already have a mobile-friendly site, it’s still worth doing a quick review of your content. Screen sizes on phones are small, so don’t forget to keep your copy super-clear and punchy for a mobile audience, with shorter sentences and paragraphs, broken up by clear headings. Make sure readers don’t have to zoom in to read your copy – keep to two font sizes – and make action buttons clear and colourful.

Another great site for viewing your website across multiple mobile devices and operating systems is Browserstack.

Website security – https – the green padlock

You might also have seen that Google has placed a deadline for the SSL switch over. After July 18, Chrome and Firefox will warn users if the site is insecure. This may cause loss of visitors and increase bounce rates. You’ll be able to tell by looking at the URL, for example on this website, you’ll see it says ‘Secure’ at the top, followed by https, rather than just http. So, it’s important to make sure you’ve upgraded to https.

Get mobile-friendly web design for your Surrey business – if you need a mobile version of your website, want to review and refresh your website content for a mobile audience, or need to upgrade to https, please get in touch.