Faster sites make for better user experience
Aran Reeks, Lead eCommerce Developer at Evosite, explains the three most important factors to consider when developing your mobile-optimised website.
According to Google, 15 percent of the global internet traffic look at websites on their mobiles or tablets in the first instance (www.mobify.com) and in our view this figure is only going to keep growing. With this in mind it has never been more important for companies to have their website ‘mobile-optimised’.
In this article we will look at:
1. The speed of your mobile site
2. The issue of buttons and links being pressed
3. The use of imagery versus text
4. Other useful tips
Speed
Faster sites make for a better user experience.
Website visitors are becoming increasingly sensitive to page load times and expect websites to load in three seconds or less and this is even more important for a mobile website where your visitors are less likely to have a fast internet connection.
The average website takes more than twice that amount, at around nine seconds. During the development stages, make sure you’re paying attention to page load times. This way you can be confident your page will load quickly to prevent the user abandoning your site out of frustration! Google provide a service to help you find and optimise performance issues on your website here: http://bit.ly/1ctDJ3S.
Pressing the right buttons
Phone screens come in a variety of sizes – as do fingers and thumbs – and users need to be able to select different links and buttons on their screens with ease. Pressing three other buttons at the same time can be very frustrating for users and could encourage them to visit your competitor’s site instead. The ‘rule of thumb’ here is that every link should be easily followed even for visitors with large thumbs.
It is a real turn-off for users if they have to swipe and pinch their page to fill in personal details or to move to the next page. This is why it is so important to ensure you only include the relevant form fields to fill in, images and amount of text.
Making sure links are big enough to select is a simple but significant step to take when designing your mobile-optimised website – if users cannot find or press the ‘Pay now securely’ button, you run the risk of customers abandoning their cart.
Use of images vs text
Images are an essential way to display your products for sale however, when users transfer to mobile optimised sites it is important not to include too many unnecessary images. Each additional image on a web page – whether desktop site or mobile site – will increase the size of your page and your page loading time – and as we already know, if a page takes too long to load, users are likely to go elsewhere.
Additional tips
For sites that make use of Flash for videos it’s key to ensure they’ll still work on mobile – as both modern Android and iOS devices do not allow Flash. Services such as Vimeo and YouTube are great for hosting your mobile videos as they cater perfectly for these devices by compressing content to ensure it downloads quickly and make use of HTML5 to make sure it’ll play on non-Flash devices.
Some of the challenges we’ve come across on mobile sites have involved forms where there’s a required file upload (e.g. Word Document) or flash-based content, such as brochure viewers, where we’ve had to replace these with a downloadable PDF version for mobile devices – it’s all about keeping the functionality of a site.
Mobile site should be fast, clean and efficient. Whilst 4G is currently being rolled out in cities, many people still don’t even have 3G and you don’t want potential customers waiting for your site to load. With more than 1.2 billion people accessing the web from their mobile devices, it has never been more important to help consumers complete transactions on your site with ease, which will ultimately help boost your bottom line.
For more information visit: www.evosite.co.uk
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