6 Simple Tips to Optimize Your Mobile Website

What makes for an amazing mobile site and an amazing desktop site are two different things. In fact, you’ve probably never marveled at how wonderful a mobile site looked. Instead, you likely just felt satisfied that you were able to do whatever you wanted to do quickly and without much fuss.

That’s because on the mobile web, utility trumps style. Fancy visuals and a great motif may look terrific on your desktop, but on mobile, all they’re likely to do is slow things down. And on that small screen, you’re not going to see much anyway.

Nevertheless, as more and more of the population experiences the web via mobile, creating a mobile website is essential. Doing so, however, requires a different frame of mind, or maybe, as Dennis Mink suggests, a trip in a time machine. “It’s really like the early days of the Internet, like 1996, 1997,” says Mink, VP of marketing at Dudamobile, a company that creates mobile sites. “We all had our 14.4 baud modems, and things were as stripped down as possible.”

Indeed, even with the spread of 3G and 4G, Mink doesn’t expect that to change. So, if you’re considering creating a mobile site, here are a few guidelines that Mink and other experts offer to make it as compelling as possible:

1. Keep It Simple

As noted, most users aren’t visiting your mobile site for the aesthetic experience. Instead, they’re trying to get something quickly, whether it’s information or a pizza. A good place to start is to ask yourself, “What are most customers going to visit our site for?” If it’s to reach a live person, then make the phone number prominent (and use Click-to-Call.) If it’s to find your address, put that up high as well. Put two or three of the most important things in one place.

“Keep navigation to a minimum while delivering the maximum amount of engaging content within a smaller screen that you get on a laptop or desktop,” says Craig Besnoy, U.S. managing director for NetBiscuits, another mobile web consultant. “In addition, a properly designed mobile site keep as much of the call to action above the mobile fold, while keeping text input to a minimum.”

2. Don’t Use a Lot of Images

Nothing slows a page down like a few large images. Mink recommends getting rid of most the images on your homepage except for ones that are considered essential and even then, you should use smaller versions. Anything else is self-sabotage since a slow user experience leads to a high bounce rate.

3. Design It for Multiple Handsets

A mobile site that’s designed for an iPhone won’t look good on a Nokia phone and might not even show up at all. That’s a mistake, says Rekha Baliga, director of customer engineering at mobile web consultant Atmio, since a big chunk of the world’s users are on a Nokia phone. Atmio keeps a database of more than 500 mobile phones and ensures that any site it creates will look good on any of them.

“Never design a site for a specific device,” says Besnoy. “Despite popular belief, everyone does not use an iPhone or Android, nor is their device running the latest version of the operating system.”

4. Learn From Other Great Mobile Sites

Most companies and brands haven’t set up a mobile site yet, but a good number have. That’s good news for you, since you can learn from the best ones (and the worst). Below are two sites that Besnoy recommends. Both use NetBiscuits’s platform, but beyond that, each — eBay’s and CBS’s — offer simple navigation, large type and few images.


5. Use an “M-Dot” URL

People Google you on their mobile phones just like they Google you on a desktop, so you should create a site that’s optimized for SEO. One important consideration is an “m-dot” URl (ex: m.abc.com.), which will help Google recognize and index your mobile site separately from your standard one.

6. Test and Listen to Feedback

Some mobile web consultants, like Atmio, offer A/B testing for mobile sites to let you compare how different designs perform. Another option is Google’s GoMo site, which lets you plug in your URL to see how it looks on a mobile phone.

Ultimately, though, your customers will provide the most valuable feedback since they are your target audience. So listen to any complaints or compliments that come your way. What you’re looking to hear is that the site worked quickly and as it should, not that it looked pretty. As Mink says: “There’s not much mystery to it. At this stage, it’s as simple as it looks. Zero in on that primary action you want [customers] to take and make that your primary focus.”