Ways to make your website smartphone friendly

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Smartphones are continuing to dominate the mobile phone landscape, and businesses need to take this into consideration when designing or upgrading their website.

Around 90% of people in the UK own a smartphone with the average person spending around two-and-a-half hours on the device every day. Smartphones make up almost half of online traffic, and this figure will only increase.

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This article looks at some of the best ways to optimise your website for smartphones so that you don’t miss out on custom from this significant audience.

1. Think differently and put mobile first

Any re-design or new site should be built first for mobile and then made compatible for desktop. This is the reverse of the traditional approach of building a website for desktop and then having a ‘scaled-down’ version for mobile.

HTML5 banner ads

HTML5 banner ads are great for all websites but work particularly well when accessing sites on smartphones. They are an excellent way of driving user engagement and interactions.

2. Optimise your website’s speed

A slow website can put customers off, so choose a web host that is reliable and fast. Other ways to help with speed are to keep the homepage as simple as possible and to avoid any unnecessary widgets or plug-ins from the site.

You can also boost your speed by enabling Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), a framework that can significantly speed up the load times of a mobile site.

3. Use clear fonts

When it comes to viewing websites on a smartphone, one of the key things is to make sure that the content is easy to read. For this reason, it is sensible to stick to fonts such as Open Sans and Droid Sans. Font size is also a consideration with the ideal size being 16 pixels for the main content body.

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Optimise button placementYour call-to-action (CTA) buttons should be easy to spot and tap. So, place them carefully and make them easy for mobile users to access using one hand. Putting your main CTA button in the centre of the screen makes a lot of sense.