For the past two weeks, I’ve hopefully gotten you to think a little bit more about your mobile visitors—how they may search, what they’re looking for and how mobile visitors differ from those on desk top computers. To close the chapter on mobile, I thought this week I would sum up mobile best practices with checklist of the must haves in a mobile site.
And last, but not least, is your website mobile usable?
To get you started thinking about your site’s mobile usability, here’s a short checklist of site characteristics useful for a good mobile experience:
- Is your site responsive (mobile-friendly)? Check your site with Google’s mobile friendly test to find out.
- Does your site has a clickable phone number? Can visitors looking to contact your office easily click on the phone number to dial a call?
- Does your site has a clickable address? Can visitors looking to find your office or location easily click on the address and it be transferred to Apple or Google Maps?
- Have you identified valuable information that mobile users can easily access? Are mobile visitors seeing what specifically are looking for?
- Identify your target audience main needs and wants from a mobile site?
- Identify website elements that will be different than for desktop users?
- Have you tracking tools to identify user valued content on your mobile site? Do you know what content mobile visitors are actually clicking on and engaging with?
- Is your content is optimized for thumbs? Design a site with people in mind (not lab rats!). People do use their thumbs to a greater extent when navigating on mobile devices- keep links and clickable content spaced to make thumb clicking relatively easy.
- Have you incorporated social media?—Unlike desktops, one of the biggest drains on mobile data is social media. Make sure your business is playing the social media game—especially to further engage your mobile user base. Incorporate buttons linking to social media pages and allow any blog or news content to be liked and spread through popular social media outlets.
- Test, Test, Test—as with your full website, you need to test to make sure users are getting the best experience. Expect to have an evaluation process that incorporates:
- Usability testing—test how usable your website is. Get feedback from a few people outside of your company—have them go through your site and point out areas where valuable info isn’t easily found or what info might be missing that they’d expect on a mobile page.
- A/B testing—test different page variants to optimize page content and page elements for mobile users. Determine what ideas/headlines/changes improve engagement and conversion on your mobile site.
- Quality testing—test for bugs, typos or other details that might not be initially apparent when the site goes live.
- Have you set goals for your mobile site? —You might have already heard of the term KPI (Key Performance Indicators), and you likely have KPIs for other parts of your business. KPIs are equally important in evaluating the performance of your mobile site. Have specific goals in mind for your users and evaluate whether they are completing those goals. If they’re not, maybe the metric you are using doesn’t fit the goal very well or perhaps you need to do some more testing to evaluate whether page content or your messaging is the right for your user base.
If you have any questions about the functionality of your website, we are here to help! Innovative web design and web content strategy are just some of the ways we go Beyond plain tech support. Contact us today for a FREE web marketing strategy consultation.
