How To Build A Mobile-Friendly Website In 11 Steps

In this comprehensive guide, we will walk you through steps to build a mobile-friendly website that looks great on any device and ensures a great user experience, driving success for your business in the digital age.

Key Takeaways

• Owning a mobile-friendly website can elevate your business to a new rank in fierce digital competition.
• Shopify is supposed to be a powerful tool for building a website with a mobile experience, given its widespread reputation.

Understanding Mobile-Friendly Design

What is a Mobile-Friendly Website?

The term “mobile-friendly website” refers to a website optimized for visitors to view and use on mobile devices. Given the increasing prevalence of mobile internet usage, it is a crucial aspect of modern web design.

There are several aspects to achieving a mobile-friendly website, including:

• Responsive design: The website automatically adjusts its layout and content to fit various screen sizes, ensuring that it works well whenever used on a mobile phone or tablet.
• User-friendly interface: Mobile-friendly websites should be designed with touchscreens in mind to interact with fingers easily and simplified navigation menus to make it clear for users to find things without excessive scrolling or zooming.
• Mobile apps: Having a separate app for mobile audiences helps the developer create a specific ecosystem, fully optimizing the mobile-specific functions that they provide.

Responsive Web Design vs. Separate Mobile Site

Responsive design involves creating a single site that adjusts its layout for different screens using fluid grids and flexible images. On the other hand, a separate mobile site is a distinct version for mobile users, often with a subdomain like “m.example.com.” 

Responsive design offers a consistent user experience, while a separate mobile site allows tailored content. However, managing two sites can lead to consistency challenges.

Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test and Ranking Factor

Mobile-friendliness has become a significant ranking factor in Google’s search algorithm. Mobile-friendly websites are more likely to rank higher in mobile search results. 

Website owners can assess their websites’ performance on mobile devices with Google’s mobile-friendly testing tool. The test evaluates various aspects of a website’s mobile usability, such as font sizes, tap targets, and viewport settings, to provide a report that indicates whether the site is mobile-friendly or not.

How To Make Your Website Mobile Responsive

1. Selecting Mobile-Responsive Themes or Templates

First of all, building a mobile-responsive website requires a theme or template that is also mobile-responsive created by the developer. This feature is widely incorporated into the templates of nearly every leading website builder. For instance:

• Shopify, a top choice for building websites, offers over 150 professionally designed themes that prioritize mobile experience without having to start from scratch or have advanced coding skills.
• Wix offers a vast selection of mobile-responsive designer-made website templates. Its customization in mobile view should be checked carefully on the go.

To access responsive themes, users can conveniently explore the official online store of website builder platforms. For instance, Shopify merchants can browse a wide range of themes specifically designed for their platform in the Shopify Theme Store. For better suggestions, they are categorized into industry, price, features, or catalog size.

Dawn, Impulse, Prestige, and Symmetry are highly acclaimed themes within the Shopify platform and well-suited for a wide spectrum of industries and diverse business types.

Similarly, other builder platforms offer a dedicated repository of themes that cater to various industries and design preferences.

Alternatively, you can explore themes on third-party providers’ websites. It’s recommended to read reviews and, if feasible, visit websites using the chosen theme on your mobile device to personally assess the user experience.

2. Ensure Readability and Legibility

Choosing a stunning template for your site is just the first step of preparation. Before starting to sell, ensuring the content is properly displayed in the mobile view is crucial.

Designing and Organizing Content for Mobile Users

• The key is prioritizing simplicity and clarity. Avoid cluttered layouts and excessive text, as these can overwhelm mobile users. Use concise and compelling content that engages users and conveys your message effectively.
• Organize your content into logical sections and use headings and subheadings to break up the text, allowing users to quickly skim through the content and find the information they need.

• Ensure the font size is large enough to be easily readable on smaller screens without zooming. Stick to web-safe fonts widely available across different devices to maintain consistency.
• Avoid using overly decorative fonts that may be challenging to read on mobile devices. 

Adjusting Content Layout for Small Screens

• Consider using a single-column design for mobile devices, as it simplifies navigation and ensures a seamless user experience.
• Utilize visual elements strategically to complement the content without overpowering it. Ensure that images are appropriately sized to prevent long loading times.

3. Optimize Images and CSS

Each site element (video, image, icon, etc.) carries a specific weight. A mobile-friendly website judged by Google dignifies the web’s speed. Thus, some best practices should be followed to improve this issue:

Compressing images for faster loading

• Use image compression techniques to reduce the file size without compromising quality. Various online tools and plugins are available to help you do it effectively, such as Optimizilla, JPEG Optimizer, Kraken.io, etc.

Implementing responsive images

• Responsive images prevent large images from being unnecessarily loaded on smaller screens, saving bandwidth and reducing load times. Use HTML and CSS techniques, such as srcset and media queries, to serve different image sizes based on the user’s viewport.

Host Your Videos with a third-party platform

• Instead of self-hosting videos, consider using third-party video hosting platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, or Wistia. These platforms offer optimized video delivery and adaptive streaming, ensuring videos load quickly and smoothly on various devices.

4. Avoid Overusing Animation

When incorporating animations into your website design, it’s important to exercise restraint and avoid overusing them. While animations can add an engaging and dynamic element to your site, excessive use can create a cluttered and distracting user experience. 

To maintain a balanced design, focus on using animations purposefully and strategically. Choose key elements, such as buttons, navigation menus, or important content sections, to apply animations that enhance user interaction and guide their attention. 

5. Ensure Touch-Friendly Elements

Most users interact with mobile devices through touch gestures, so ensuring that buttons and links are easily clickable is crucial.

Designing Buttons and Links for Touchscreen Devices

• Create buttons and links with sizes and spacing that accommodate touch inputs. Ideally, a touch-friendly button should be large enough to be easily tapped with a finger and have enough spacing around it to prevent unintended clicks.

Avoiding Small and Closely Spaced Elements

• Think about the places that can catch your eye to put important buttons like CTAs. To improve that, avoid placing interactive elements too close together, leading to mis-taps and frustration for users.

6. Implement a Mobile-Friendly Navigation Menu

• Consider using a hamburger menu icon (☰) to represent the navigation menu on mobile devices, saving valuable screen space and keeping the interface clean and uncluttered. 
• Limit the number of items in the mobile navigation menu to the most essential pages.

• Organize the menu items logically, placing the most important ones at the top. Consider using drop-downs for secondary navigation options to enhance organization further.

7. Ensure Mobile Compatibility with Forms

Completing forms on mobile devices can become challenging without optimization. Here are some practices to improve: 

Designing Mobile-Friendly Input Fields

Use larger input boxes and buttons that are easy to tap with sufficient spacing. Consider using input masks or numeric keyboards for fields that require specific formats (e.g., phone numbers or dates).

Testing Form Submission on Mobile Devices

Thoroughly test form submissions on various mobile devices and operating systems. Check for any issues related to form validation, field alignment, or input errors that may occur on mobile.

8. Eliminate Pop-Ups and Overlays

Although pop-ups can work effectively on the desktop version, they are not recommended on smaller screens like mobile devices. 

Pop-ups and unnecessary overlays should be removed to create a more seamless navigation and pleasant experience for mobile users

9. Space Out Your Links

Clicking with a thumb is more tricky than using the mouse. So, keep these practices in mind:

• Use Ample Padding: Ample padding around links creates a clear separation from other elements, making it easier for users to tap the links they want.
• Prioritize Important Links: Placing essential links prominently and spacing them appropriately helps users easily access crucial information and actions, especially linking out to mobile-optimized pages.

10.  Testing On Multiple Devices

Once you have implemented the necessary changes to make your website mobile responsive, the next crucial step is testing.

Run URLs Through Google’s Mobile-Friendly Tool

Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to assess the mobile responsiveness of your website. Enter your website’s URLs into the tool to analyze the pages, providing feedback on their mobile compatibility.

Try Out Different Device Sizes from Your Desktop

As you gradually decrease the tab’s width when using the web, you will observe your site transforming and adapting into a more mobile-friendly version with elements adjusting to fit smaller screens.

Otherwise, right-click, select ‘Inspect’ on the webpage, and click the two devices  below to test how it looks on mobile quickly.

11. Seek User Feedback and Iteratively Improve

Last but not least, after implementing all mobile-friendly optimizations, encourage users to provide their opinions and suggestions about the experience on your website. 

By continuously seeking feedback and making improvements, you can ensure that your website remains user-centric and delivers an exceptional mobile experience to your visitors.

Summarize

The process of building a mobile-friendly website can be summarized in 11 steps:

1. Choose a mobile-responsive theme or template for your website.
2. Ensure the capability of readability and legibility
3. Optimize images and CSS to improve loading speed.
4. Avoid overusing animation to maintain a smooth user experience.
5. Ensure touch-friendly elements, like buttons and links, for seamless interaction.
6. Implement a mobile-friendly navigation menu for easy access.
7. Make sure your forms are mobile-compatible and user-friendly.
8. Eliminate pop-ups and overlays that can disrupt the mobile experience.
9. Space out your links to prevent accidental clicks on small screens.
10. Test your website on multiple devices to ensure responsiveness.
11. Seek user feedback and continuously improve your website based on their input.

By following these steps, we hope you can create an exceptional mobile-friendly website that successfully serves your business in the world of digital competition.

How To Build A Mobile-Friendly Website: FAQs