Sponsored Content: 15% of U.S. adults use the internet only on mobiles. Is your business safe?

Published 7:00 am Tuesday, August 27, 2024

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Smartphones’ rising use and ownership rates keeps transforming internet habits as websites become easier to navigate and mobiles become more reliable yearly. Sites have slowly become accessed more often from smartphones instead of desktops, all the more since one can easily activate the “website” display feature in any browser and enjoy the best of both worlds. Home broadband internet usage has dropped from 20% to 15% since 2018 and the trend’s trajectory can only keep going down. Evidently, the fact that users can access your website through a desktop window isn’t a reason to stay complacent if you’ve been postponing improving your business’s website user experience on phones. According to a recent study by the Pew Research Center, 15% of the U.S. adults surveyed this year admit to owning and using only smartphones when internet surfing, be it to communicate, shop, play, read, or do any other thing. 

Some of these activities seemed difficult, if not impossible, to do from a phone years ago, even if the mobile web became accessible on these devices in 1996 thanks to Nokia. Nevertheless, as the recent trends keep pushing smartphone-friendly apps and sites to the forefront, it’s clear as the light of the day that you need to transform your website into its most mobile-friendly variant possible. Let’s see how you can secure your competitive advantage this way and have faith that it’s not a tall order, regardless of how intimidating the goal may initially sound.

First, responsiveness

With 57% of internauts admitting they wouldn’t vouch for an inadequately designed site regardless of the business’s excellence, it’s only natural to feel chills down your spine and wonder if anyone has ever quit yours despite wanting to buy from you. After all, you’ve invested so much in your brand’s products and services to cater to the targeted audience that some unresponsiveness and lag can’t take all the credit away from you. Or can it?

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A responsive website adjusts and works on any screen size, whether a smartphone, tablet, or phablet. It works perfectly both in landscape and portrait modes, with or without battery saving mode on. Things that can justifiably impact how your website runs are internet speed and smartphone model, among others, for you can not control these aspects. Nevertheless, if your website breaks down when you access it on a not-so-modern mobile device, this isn’t an excuse to leave things like that.

Some tips can help you nail this operation so that your website adapts to different resolutions and screen sizes. For instance, you should build responsive typography that will help fine-tune fonts depending on your customer’s device. Or you can choose CSS media queries, the feature that helps content like text and images adapt to different screen resolutions and other specific conditions. This became a standard 12 years ago and quickly became the keystone technology of the greatest website design.  

You can run specific tests, such as those offered by Google’s DevTools stack, to ensure your website has reached its responsiveness zenith.

Keep texts short and sweet

With a decreasing attention span caused by social media and internet usage and the ever-perfecting content display phenomenon, a business has almost no chance of magnetizing customers if it shoves endless chunks of texts down their throats. Smartphone users generally want quick and easily digestible content that hits their spots without consuming more time than necessary. 

To nail this operation, forward-looking businesses ally with seasoned market experts who can conduct research, recommend the best practices, and empower them through their avant-garde tech and unmatched prowess. Data and market research is the cornerstone tech in industries like life science, according to specialists from Savanta USA, helping sector participants perfect their work, tools, diagnostic testing, and the list can go on.

Here are the best tips for keeping things short and to the point, meeting customers’ demand for digesting quality information easily and rapidly.

  • Develop a visual hierarchy that will help readers make sense of the sections and main points at a quick glance. You can also create headers for each block and a succinct copy description for site copies and blogs. 
  • Dare to combine negative spacing with white space. The former makes the page look organized while the latter keeps things easily readable. These will help prevent visual clutter, emphasize the main points, and so on.
  • A text for every idea should be enough to convey the message intended and ensure the customer may react to your CTAs. For blogs, employ the same principle of content-dividing headers.

Consider how the button works and looks

Buttons are the foundation of a killer CTA. Generally, websites have these prompts that encourage action at the end of blogs, on the bottom of the page, but data discloses that most persons reading them only cover 60% of the content. This is why yours should be visible, easily discoverable, and sufficiently catchy to command attention and get users to read them. As a rule of thumb, the elements that draw attention are more effective at making a call to action, as individuals generally concentrate their attention on some key regions of their displays and websites. 

Numerous design elements also impact graphic patterns, making a concept that’s widely studied – eye predictability. 

Eradicate pop-ups 

Just because there are numerous pop-up blockers for our browsers out there doesn’t mean that they represent a neglectable element in your website development, nor that mobile users will overlook a pop-up without such extensions installed. These may get reasonable conversion rates, as studies show they can increase it by four, but they’re still as annoying as possible. Pop-ups, ads, cookies, and other such burdens can only put prospective customers off and redirect them to your competition.  

There are ways to make the best of both worlds; all you need is to get honest answers to some questions and perfect your pop-up strategy according to them. Are your pop-ups catchy, effective, valuable, and delivering something that not every website you stumble upon can offer? Are they popping up at the wrong or perfect time? Are their CTAs clear? 

These tips will help you realize what your e-commerce website needs and which areas need improvement so that you can secure your competitive advantage and manage to convert more clicks into conversions.