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51.3% of all internet usage in 2016 came from mobile or tablet devices and this figure is predicted to continue to rise, it has never been more important for your website to perform correctly on mobile or you are missing out on a huge percentage of your audience.

If you’ve dabbled in your Analytics and think you don’t need to make any changes to your website because “only 30%” of your audience viewed your website on mobile devices and all your leads are coming from desktop, this is still 30% of potential leads that you are losing and your leads are coming from desktop because your mobile website sucks.

Are you ready to move into the 21^st century and drive more mobile traffic to your site? Keep reading to find out our top tips on how to make your mobile visitors happy!

Site Speed

Internet users are greedy folk; we want it all and we want it now. There have been many studies on how long users will stay on a page before abandoning it if it doesn’t load, including this Google study that states that 53% of users will wait no longer than 3 seconds for a page to load before leaving the website altogether. The same study of 10,000 domains found that the average load time for a mobile site is 19 seconds!

If this still isn’t enough to prove the importance of a good mobile site, mobile is a Google ranking factor which means if your site isn’t performing well on mobile this will likely result in lower organic rankings on desktop too.

Head over to the Google PageSpeed Insights tool and you may be shocked to see in black and white how poorly your website performs on mobile. Some quick fixes to improve your mobile speed are:

• Move to a dedicated server for improved speed and security benefits rather than relying on a third-party hosting solution which may not be able to handle the amount of traffic your website may be receiving
• Images are usually the culprit when it comes to slow page speed as they take a lot longer to load that text based content. Resize and compress your images using third party tools or alternatively come CMS systems such as WordPress have this functionality already built it for simplicity
• Minimize the number of requests and redirects that are slowing down your site speed. If your site has a mess of 301 redirects then this will increase the time it takes to load the destination page. Also remove unnecessary and unused elements that are code heavy!

Robots.txt

Whilst your website should have been built with SEO in mind, in the first instance it should have been built for the user. If you have a multitude of blocked files on your website, this could be damaging your rankings as Google should be able to access your website as a user can – if you’re allowing users to see something but not Google, this looks malicious.

Use another of Google’s tools, Google Search Console, and test your robots.txt file to ensure you have no blocking factors or indexing issues.

Read our extensive guide on how to set up your robots.txt file

Popups and Advertisements

Google have released a statement previously stating that pages that make content difficult to be accessed by the user on mobile devices will likely not be ranked well. There needs to be a compromise between call to actions and user experience. If the first thing a user sees when they click through to your mobile website is a large popup ad that covers the entire screen then rather that entice them it may do just the opposite.

Reconsider the role popups play in the website strategy and ensure they do not cover the page’s main content and are not difficult to dismiss.

Non-Mobile Friendly Redirects

When 301 redirects are set up, ensure the redirect takes the user to the mobile equivalent of the page rather than the desktop page. It is confusing and poor experience for the user to keep changing between the desktop and mobile version of your site due to poor cross linking.

In the instance that a mobile user may accidentally find themselves on the desktop version of a page, ensure that you immediately redirect them to the mobile version of the page they were trying to access – not the homepage of the mobile site, this will lead in them bouncing off the website as they will think the page doesn’t exist on mobile.

Another great feature of Google Search Console is that it identifies any broken links and redirects so you can work through them manually.

Need a technical SEO audit of your site to identify areas that are holding you back? Get in touch with the team and ask about our SEO services.