Understand and design with your users’ needs in mind

Making sure your business’s website works equally well on a variety of mobile interfaces and platforms has never been more important than it is today. With mobile sales and mobile advertising becoming increasingly predominant, you need a website that’s flexible, adjustable, and provides a consistent and engaging user experience – no matter how it’s accessed.

Good responsive design keeps speed in mind

Research shows that a website delay greater than one second can greatly disrupt a potential customer’s user experience. And while you can’t control outside factors like internet problems or damaged cellphone towers, you can take steps to make sure your site loads optimally. These include loading content that your viewers will see, like “above-the-fold content,” first, while allowing background content to load later.

Set a “performance budget” for each page on your website

Another trick to make sure your website loads quickly on mobile devices is to set a predetermined limit on the overall size of a page. With the size of the average webpage growing, “page bloat” has become a major problem for webpages, especially mobile ones. Just because the average page size is increasing doesn’t mean that yours has to – and presetting a size limit will go a long way toward creating an optimal user experience, no matter how viewers access your page.

Adjust image size to save on data consumption

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but the prevalence of large images on websites is one of the biggest reasons why web pages are constantly using more data. For good or bad, the popularity of high-definition mobile displays, such as the retina displays on recent generations of iPhones and iPads, has only increased this trend.

While you do want your website’s images to look great, you don’t want to use more data than you have to; so you should make sure your website looks at screen size to reformat images and reduce data usage. A variety of services are available, including adaptive images, which, when combined with other responsive design methods, can automatically re-scale images to greatly reduce mobile data expenditure.

Make sure you use a quality hosting service

When it comes to optimizing performance for mobile websites, choosing the right host can make a serious difference. Determining the best hosting service for your business depends on factors like your budget, the complexity and size of your website, and the amount of people currently visiting the site (or that you expect to visit in the near future).

If you’re just starting out and have a small budget, you’ll probably just want to search for the most economical hosting deal. However, if your website receives a lot of traffic, is image and video heavy, and you have a serious budget, it might make sense to hire a more high-end hosting service with dedicated servers and a greater level of customer support.

Quality hosting and fast servers can also pay dividends in the SEO arena as well; Google currently uses page speed to help determine the ranking of websites, and it will soon be factoring in mobile page speed rankings into its algorithms as well.

As mobile eCommerce grows, responsive design is increasingly important

With mobile eCommerce now nearly a third of all US ecommerce, it might not be long before mobile devices overtake traditional computer sales as the primary form of online commerce. This means that making sure your website loads quickly, is easy to use, and adjusts to the needs of a variety of mobile devices is becoming increasingly important.

At Creative Technology Partners, it’s our job to help businesses leverage the latest technology to increase efficiency, cut costs, and boost their brand awareness. To make sure your company stays abreast of the latest tech advances, contact us today for a free consultation.