Build Your Website for Mobile Devices First

In web design we often spend most of our time on animations, on perfect image quality, or even on designs that are mainly visible on desktops and laptops. But who will actually see our website on a desktop or a laptop in the end? Perhaps only us, our friends, the web designer and maybe 10-15% of visitors, a figure that includes ourselves coming back to our own website again and again?

Before we say anything more, let’s look at some data collected over a long period from high-traffic websites, to get a better idea of what we are talking about.

The images above show the traffic of websites & e-shops and which devices users prefer to visit them on. And in case you are thinking “yes, but my business is mainly B2B”, we will answer with 2 purely B2B e-shops: there the trend is naturally less pronounced, yet the share still comes to around 60%!

What to do to have a successful site on mobile devices

In short, if you follow the points below, the mobile version of your site, or its responsive design, has a very good chance of being successful.

• Your site must be genuinely fast. Test it with Google PageSpeed Insights to find problems that can be fixed easily
• Keep your content to a reasonable length, because on a phone nobody wants to scroll and scroll again
• Users must be able to find what they want quickly and easily, with no unnecessary information.
• Guide users easily to the next step they will probably want to take. In other words, when they reach the end of a page’s content, they should be able to find what they want right where they are, without going back to the top
• Users must be able to read what your website says easily. Content with low contrast and small fonts is very hard to read on a phone, especially when the visitor is outdoors.
• Do not use lots of animations, as they become tiring on mobile devices.

One extra tip we can give you is to avoid sliders, because they do two bad things. First, they “load” lots of files and slow the website down. Second, in their place you could have 1 or 2 sections through which the user could easily find what they were looking for.