Quick Tips to Make Your Content More Mobile-Friendly
If we had a dollar for every time we talked about mobile-friendly content, we'd have so many dollars.
It's not that hard to make your content mobile-friendly these days, but really double-checking that it IS matters even more now.
In 2023, 57.8% of website traffic was generated through mobile devices.
80% of the time Twitter users spend on Twitter is on a mobile device.
59% of web browsing is on a mobile device.
And users read differently on their mobile devices, too: "Users give 68% of their attention to the center and top half of a mobile site and a full 86 % to the upper two-thirds.
Give your on-the-go audience what they're looking for on their smart phones and tablets, and reap the rewards of greater traffic and a more engaged audience. Start with these tips:
Keep titles and paragraphs short.
If you can lose some extra words, drop 'em. If you can say something in one sentence versus three, do it. Be a ruthless editor, and read what you write out loud to make sure it's snappy, easy to understand, and memorable.
Mobile users have places to be and apps to open, so they have extremely limited attention spans. You've only got micro-seconds to show them you've got the content they want!
Don't make us zoom in.
This especially applies to those nifty charts, complex infographics, and any other data visualizations you've spent time and money creating. The more complex and nifty these might be, the harder it might be for a mobile user to actually READ them.
Create bite-sized versions of your visuals that are friendlier for small screens, and that will also look better on social media platforms. Triple-check size requirements and best practices. And test how things look on multiple devices!
Add captions to your videos, no matter what.
You probably know that most people view videos on their phones with the sound off. So add captions! Here's how to do it on:
And it's not just about convenience or boosting your video views. Video captions make your content more accessible for your users who are hard of hearing or need to see content to understand it.
Make the mobile experience a good one.
Users have a lot of other options if they don't like your content! So brush up on your mobile UX to make sure you're putting your best-looking content forward.
Remember that a whopping "53% of visits are abandoned if a mobile site takes longer than three seconds to load.
Test, test, and test again.
Use Google Search's Mobile-Friendly Test to (you guessed it) test how mobile-friendly your site is. If it's not looking so friendly, it's time to get to work.
And regularly check on your analytics to figure out how much of your readership is viewing your content on a mobile device. Your Google Analytics will tell you, your Squarespace Analytics will tell you, and even your Facebook Insights will tell you if your users are eyeing your stuff on their iPhones.