We all know that WordPress offers numerous excellent themes that adhere to mobile responsive designs. However, this alone isn’t necessarily enough for a successful website. With this in mind, we should further narrow this topic down to the question of: Is a mobile-friendly WordPress website enough to run your business successfully?
It can seem a little cumbersome for a business owner to understand the differences between mobile-friendly, mobile-optimization, and responsive designs. As such, in today’s guide, we’ll address the elephant in the room that no one wanted to mention, but had always wondered about, by answering the following questions:
What is a mobile-friendly website?
What is mobile optimization?
What is a responsive design?
What type of design best suits my business?
Mobile-Friendly Websites
Google analyzes and rewards webpages on its SERP based on the page’s mobile-friendliness. As such, as a business owner, it’s easy to conclude that having a mobile-friendly website is enough.
Now, for Google’s bots, a mobile-friendly design may be all you need. But, when it comes to your users, you need to look at the design strategy from a different perspective.
Often, it can seem hard to know where to begin. If this is a situation you find yourself in, you should immediately head to Google’s webmaster tools. In simple terms, mobile-friendly websites should be nothing but a minimized version of your desktop website.
One of the critical aspects of delivering your web content in a mobile-friendly fashion is to keep a focus on the font size. The best practice is to have at least a 14pt or 16pt font size for your desktop website. However, when it comes to mobile devices, the font size shrinks. Naturally, when font sizes are made smaller, they become hard to read. And, if your content is hard to read, then Google may consider your webpage as non-mobile-friendly.
Just because your website is mobile-friendly doesn’t change the fact that you designed it with desktop users in mind. So, your website may be functional on mobile, but it may not be as user-friendly as it could be. This is where specialist mobile optimization kicks in.
Mobile-Optimized Websites
All mobile-optimized websites are mobile-friendly by definition. However, not all mobile-friendly websites are mobile-optimized. Mobile optimization involves devising a mobile-first strategy. As a result, these websites are designed for smaller screens; hence, the website will reformat itself for mobile users, and there is no need to minimize any of the content.
Some of the visible highlights of a mobile-optimized website include:
Implementing a single-column layout
Thumb-friendly navigation
Large graphics with white-space borders (a necessity for those of us with large fingers!)
Focus on formatting to enhance maximum readability
Scaled-down image sizes for quicker loading times
Compared to desktop users, mobile users are on the go and often need quick answers to accomplish tasks. For example, a mobile user might be looking for solutions such as reviews of local establishments, directions, etc. On the other hand, many will still read blogs and consume more substantial amounts of information on their laptops/desktops. This isn’t the case in every scenario, of course; some mobile users will continue to engage with your site while on the train, for example. However, you should ideally design your mobile site with the former in mind.
Ultimately, the objective of a mobile-optimized website is to deliver a website that can be as seamless as possible for mobile users. In a nutshell, mobile users are looking for quick and efficient ways to identify solutions to their problems, and mobile optimization helps you meet this goal.
Websites created with responsive designs
When your website is built with responsive design strategies, it starts to adjust itself or respond to the display size of the user’s device. Indeed, to put this simply, every device has a slightly different display size; some mobile devices, for example, will be wider or taller than others. Responsive designs aim to target this particular demographic.
Responsive designs allow the website to reformat and restructure itself for any device, irrespective of the display size. Mobile optimization does the same for mobile devices but is often ineffective for tablets, laptops with smaller displays, or desktops with larger monitors. This is where responsive design comes into play, scaling your website elements in accordance with the available screen size.
Responsive designs help make your website more flexible and offer users a great experience across all devices. It’s the only option that provides both an excellent aesthetic and optimized usability on any device.
Mobile-first design strategies
A recent study found that adults spend an average of 2 hours and 51 minutes on their mobile devices daily, but only 2 hours and 12 minutes daily on their desktops. With this in mind, mobile-first is a design strategy that encourages developers to create the mobile version of the website first, rather than focusing on the traditional desktop version. The same strategy goes for products designed for mobile users.
Here, we need to understand the root cause of design issues. When you try to include several features on a single web page or app screen, you start getting design issues. Try to implement a simpler and cleaner design structure when you have a mobile-first strategy. In doing so, you will prioritize the most important features for your mobile design. However, you can still implement additional features on the desktop version.
What Type of Design Best Suits My Business Standards?
To answer the above question, you’ll need to take a step back and answer the following.
What is the purpose of your website?
What do you want your website to do for visitors?
What devices are you expecting your visitors to access your site from?
Websites are built for a purpose: to take the users on a digital journey that is as seamless as possible. When your website is intuitive and easy to navigate, you are more likely to get higher conversions.
You will also need to consider the budget you have allocated to design and develop your website. In general, mobile-optimized and mobile responsive websites are on the higher end of cost, since mobile responsive websites demand longer to design and develop. However, mobile-friendly websites are more budget-friendly.
As a business, when you look at the bigger picture for the long run, the functionality, features, and usability rendered by a responsive or mobile-optimized website will yield a higher ROI than a mobile-friendly website alone.
SEO:
Focus Key phrase: WordPress website
Meta Title: Is a WordPress Website Enough to Address the Needs of Businesses?
Meta Description: Having a WordPress website for your business is great, but is that enough? Learn how you can further enhance the user experience of your WordPress website.
URL: is-a-WordPress-website-enough-for-your-business
Wrapping up
Revisit your target customer profiles and think about their personas. What value or experience do you want them to experience while surfing through your website? Ideally, you should fine-tune your website for that experience to generate greater conversions overall.
For further details and queries, feel free to send us an email at info@engagebranding.com.
