Mobile Design Tips for Small Business Websites

Let’s talk about the big picture. Over half of global internet traffic now comes from mobile devices. That means a significant portion of your potential customers are accessing your website on their phones. Depending on your industry, that number may be even higher. Places like restaurants, coffee shops, auto repair, and other businesses that people look for when they’re on the go may even have most of their users visiting their website from mobile. So, if it isn’t already obvious, you could be losing out on a huge chunk of business if your site isn’t mobile-friendly.

What Exactly is “Mobile-Friendly”?

Maybe you already have a mobile-responsive design. But do you know how well it functions? You’ve probably found yourself in this scenario: You search for something on your phone, and when you head to a website you’ve found on Google, you find the text is tiny, the images are slow to load, the navigation is hard to tap, elements move around as you scroll, pop-ups and ads are blocking content, and maybe the site won’t even load over slow cell service at all.

Chances are, you’re leaving that site, frustrated, without even giving it a few seconds chance…and you head straight to a competitor whose website works smoothly over cellular data.

In fact, this is exactly why Google recently changed their search ranking algorithm to index your website based on its mobile version. Don’t have a mobile website? Well, you may actually get de-listed from Google.

Find out everything you need to know about this major change in our post What Google’s Mobile-First Indexing Update Means for Your Small Business.

Is Your Site Too Slow on Mobile?

Let’s find out. CornerClicks has a handy site speed checker right on our site, which uses Google’s own algorithm to determine your site speed and how well it performs on mobile and desktop.

Information is power. And I can almost guarantee your site does not run well on mobile. How do I know that? Am I a witch? (Maybe!)

Well, no. Actually, it’s because most sites are poorly optimized. Partly, because we were thrown to the wolves when we were told we all needed a website. How dare the nerds demand this of us! We are not coders! We are not designers! (I say, even though I am—but, hey, there was a time when I wasn’t!)

Evolution of Website Design

Remember websites from the 90s and 2000s? I guarantee, if someone still has a site leftover from that time, (and boy howdy, some people do), that website probably zooms on mobile. Customer experience will obviously be lacking here, but that’s a post for another day.

Since the internet has evolved, websites have become increasingly more complex over the last 10 or so years. More bloated with junk, more bloated with data, plugins, animations, you name it. The more shiny a plugin seems, the more we all wanted to install it. Present party included. And that wasn’t such a bad thing…until we all, as a society, suddenly decided we wanted to take a step back into the stone age. Or at least, rewind the internet back a few years.

The Mobile Shift

Once we all switched to mobile, those beautiful sites that nerds like me were designing suddenly weren’t so beautiful anymore. They were clunky. And slow. And annoying. And while mobile speeds are getting faster, we’ve all been in places where our speed drops to 4G, 3G, LTE, or you lost signal completely. And I’m not just talking about rural America here…cities can have terrible reception too, because there’s no place to stick the cell towers! Even right here in the heart of Valencia, CA, our signal can drop to zero right in the middle of the city. Good luck with that drive-up order from Target. (LOAD, APP. I AM HERE!)

A Small Aside on Big Corporations

Now, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that you’ll find that a lot of big corporate websites don’t function well on mobile either. They don’t need to. They have brand recognition and can spend millions on advertising. They can get away with imperfect performance scores. Life ain’t fair, huh?

However, they do lose business when users are frustrated. Here’s a brief personal anecdote: I have abandoned my cart when ready to check out on Barnes & Noble’s website multiple times, because they have the absolute most frustrating website experience and the slowest load times I have experienced on any eCommerce site—even on DESKTOP. Forget about mobile, it’s not even worth the effort. (Go ahead, put their site into our speed test. You’ll see what I’m talking about.)

Do they get away with it? Sure. Is it losing them business? Most definitely. Does it matter? I guess we can leave that up to the shareholders.

Speed Matters

So, mobile access is still not nearly as good as desktop speeds, no matter how much better cell signals have gotten. Hey, I even lose bars just going from my living room to my bedroom. (True story.) Even with all these leaps in technology, having your computer plugged into an ethernet cable is still better and faster than wifi. It may seem like an obvious statement to some, but not everyone knows that wifi is still inferior technology. It sure is convenient though. That is, unless you have concrete in your walls. Or metal. Or brick…

Anyway, in short: speed varies. A lot. So your website needs to hit a super-fast bottom line.

Clean Design is Key

We have come far from the days of super cool and weird website design. I miss those days, but so it goes. Recent studies have shown that users prefer easy-to-use sites that have a clean design.

Let’s be honest. Most of us now use the internet for handy information and a quick entertainment fix. Think about it: you don’t expect YouTube videos to be produced like movies. And when you search for information online, you want just that: information. You want an easy recipe—and, let’s talk about this, how frustrating are recipe sites? We’ve all been to them, and we’ve all been annoyed by them. I want to say you probably prefer whichever one is easiest to navigate, but come on, I haven’t found one yet.

Simple Steps to Improve Mobile Performance

Creating a clean website that’s also modern and has a design your customers will love is definitely easier said than done. So how do you make a mobile site customers will love? Short of learning how to code, let’s outline some simple, super-low-tech ways you can quickly improve your site:

• Use small images. Resize them, or use a compression tool like TinyPNG.
• Don’t put text over an image. Please. We know it was trendy for a second but no one can read it.
• Remove animations. That includes loading screens. (Search engines will dock you for this because they think your site is not showing its information to users fast enough.)
• Embed your videos from someplace like YouTube. Don’t upload them to your host’s server.
• Reduce widgets and plugins as much as possible.
• Limit custom and fancy fonts. Try to stick to only 2-3. (It’s good design too.) Think: a cool font for headings and a legible font for body text. And when I say cool, I do not mean Papyrus. More like Bebas or Calistoga.
• Avoid heavy backgrounds. Solid colors or a very small (file size) pattern is best. Don’t use videos or large photographs.

Conclusion

Hopefully, this has given you a little food for thought on why website speeds matter, along with a couple easy-to-implement tips to get started. But we also know website design is hard and frustrating.