Is your website mobile-optimized?
Are you serving the right content to your mobile visitors?
Questioning your site’s mobile performance is more important than ever as web traffic is increasingly being generated by users on mobile devices. Read ahead to learn about some mobile trends, some site optimization techniques, and some tools to help you test for success.
Mobile deserves your attention
Mobile web traffic could soon exceed desktop web traffic – the pressure is on to make sure mobile users receive a first-class experience. Depending on the sector, companies should consider using a mobile-first approach when it comes to developing their websites. This means designing a site from the ground-up to serve mobile users, instead of starting with desktop. Mobile users expect quick loading content that is easy to navigate. They also want the most important features to be easily accessible. Using a mobile-first approach will help you identify what the top features are.
How do you know if your site is fully optimized? Testing for mobile is not a mature science. There is continual innovation in the field, and design conventions are in flux. There are some approaches you can take, though. The first can be a sanity check: can you, your colleagues, and your family and friends navigate the site without having to think? (‘Thinking’ might entail having to zoom to find navigation, having to scroll left or right to find hidden columns of content, and/or having to spend more than 30 seconds hunting for the content you came to the site for.)
A second test you can do is to check your site’s device targeting behaviour (i.e. specifying which version of the site to serve each types of device). Are mobile devices being routed correctly? Or are they still showing your desktop version? Also, be sure to take into consideration the differences between smartphones and tablets in your site designs. When tablets first emerged, Google Analytics grouped them with smartphones under one category called ‘mobile devices’; the industry thus viewed the relationship in the same way. Over time, though, research lead to conclusions showing that tablet users have very different usage habits than smartphone users.
We now know, for example, that smartphones are used more heavily during the day and away from home, while tablets are used more heavily in the evening and at home (usually on the couch in front of a television). Google Analytics has since separated reporting for the two types of mobile devices in their Audience module. Be sure your mobile site caters to each device type and focus your efforts on the type of user more likely to be accessing your site.
One more test you can do is search for your site on Google from a mobile device. It’s a quick test: if your site is considered by Google to be styled appropriately for mobile, a mobile indicator will appear next to your search result (see diagram opposite).
Squish the bugs
Wouldn’t it be great if code always worked the first time? It’s a nice dream. In reality, though, we’ve come to accept that we’re all human and can’t conceivably program a site to work perfectly on every device right away. Luckily, there are a number of debugging tools that can help developers achieve (near) perfection.
Likely the most used debugging tool is Google Chrome’s DevTools. If you have Chrome, you have DevTools. You can have a look yourself by simply right-clicking on any webpage element and selecting ‘Inspect Element’. DevTools allows you to play around with the code and see live feedback on the page as you make changes, without having to commit anything to the actual server-side code. DevTools also allows you to emulate oodles of phones and tablets, all within the browser window.
Achieving zippy performance
High-resolution images, bloated script libraries, and uncompressed stylesheets all contribute to site load time. After your site is tested and looks good, it’s important to address performance issues, as users are very likely to hit the back button if they have to wait for more than 5-10 seconds. Site load time is especially a concern for mobile since data transfer rates are generally lower than broadband. A useful tool to help you measure your site’s performance is Google’s PageSpeed Insights (http://goo.gl/jexvDJ). It measures against a number of speed and user experience rules, gives you separate ratings for mobile and desktop, and gives you solutions for each of problems it found. Check it out!
