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Page Speed Matters: 4 Reasons Why Bloggers Need To Care About Load Time

Posted on June 11, 2018 by Hosting

The post Page Speed Matters: 4 Reasons Why Bloggers Need To Care About Load Time appeared first on HostGator Blog . Why Page Speed Matters for Your Blog Everyone’s talking about how important page speed is for online businesses now. But does it really matter for your blog? It might, depending on your goals and whether you earn money from your blog. Here’s how to know if page load times are a big deal for your blog ( hint: the answer is yes ), and how to test and improve your blog’s page speed. 4 Ways Faster Page Load Times Help Your Blog   1. Faster pages rank better in the search results. Page load time is a factor in Google’s desktop search results rankings. In July, Google’s planned Speed Update will add mobile page load times to the factors for mobile search result rankings. Google’s Webmaster Central blog says all pages will be held to the same standard for search rankings, but that developers expect the update to “only affect pages that deliver the slowest experience.” How big a deal is it? If your mobile pages load fast or even at middling speeds, you’re probably OK. If your site loads really slowly on mobile, now’s the time to start speeding it up.   2. Fast page loads keep visitors from giving up on your blog. Even if Google doesn’t downrank your site for loading slowly on mobile, visitors may decide it’s not worth waiting around for your content. More than half of mobile users will bail on a site that takes more than three seconds to load—but many mobile pages take 15 or more seconds to load . How big a deal is it? It depends on your bounce rate and your page speed. Check your analytics to compare your mobile and desktop bounce rates. If your bounce rate is higher and your page load times are lower on mobile than on desktop, you’ve got a problem that needs fixing.   3. Faster page loads may help you beat the competition. If you sell on your blog and have competitors, remember that they’re under the same pressure to get with the page speed program. Deliver faster load times than they do and you may appear higher in search results. How big a deal is it? If you make money from your blog and sell in a competitive niche, faster load times are a must.   4. Faster page load times may raise your blog’s conversion rates. Even if you don’t sell on your blog, there’s probably something you’d like your visitors to do besides read and leave— join your email list , follow you on social media, join the discussion in the comments. All of these steps are conversions, just as getting a visitor to sign up for a class or buy the jewelry you blog about are conversions. Faster page speeds won’t translate directly into more conversions, but they can contribute. How big a deal is it? If prospects find your competition first in search results and never see your blog, or visit but bounce after 8 seconds of waiting, there’s no chance they’ll convert. Get those calls to action in front of your visitors fast and you stand a better chance of earning conversions.   5 Free Google Tools To Improve Your Page Load Times Here are five Google tools you can use to see how fast your site loads and how you can make it faster.   1. Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test is easy. Plug the page URL you want to test into the search field and run your test. In a minute or so, you’ll get the verdict: mobile-friendly or not. If there were any issues loading your page during the test, you’ll get a list of those along with tips on fixing them.   2. Google PageSpeed Insights PageSpeed Insights compares your site’s load times on desktop and mobile. You may find that your site scores fine on the Mobile-Friendly Test but does poorly on PageSpeed’s mobile evaluation. Again, you’ll get a list of suggestions for improvement (such as optimizing your images for fast loading times ) plus a downloadable file of site elements that Google optimized for you.   3. Lighthouse Lighthouse is a good option if the fixes recommended in your Mobile-Friendly and PageSpeed test results don’t solve your slow load times. It’s a developer tool, so the results are more technical than those in the tests above. They’re also broader – Lighthouse checks SEO, progressive web app performance, accessibility, best practices, and overall performance. You’ll get a downloadable report with recommendations you can work on or share with a professional developer.   4. Speed Scorecard Speed Scorecard is one of Google’s newest tools.  It lets you compare load times for up to ten sites, including your own. However, its comparison database only includes sites popular enough to appear in the Chrome User Experience Report. Most smaller blogs won’t show up, but that doesn’t mean you can’t check out larger competitors or colleagues in your niche.   5. Revenue Impact Calculator Google’s new Revenue Impact Calculator (below the Speed Scorecard) is where you can put a dollar amount on your page speed, if you sell things on your blog. Even if your site doesn’t show up in the Speed Scorecard database, you can still measure the revenue impact of speeding up your page loads if you enter a few pieces of data from your dashboard and accounts: Current page load speed Average monthly site visitors Average order value Conversion rate For example, a blog that loads in 8 seconds, has 500 visitors a month, an average order value of $50 and a conversion rate of two percent could earn $471 more per year by reducing the page load time to 4 seconds. Another blog that loads in 5 seconds, gets 20,000 monthly visitors, has an average order value of $100 and a conversion rate of 1% could earn $14,721 more per year by dropping the page load time to 2.8 seconds.   Page Speed Does Matter for Blogs Ultimately, page speed is a big deal if you want visitors, readers, and revenue for your blog, and it will probably become an even bigger deal as more traffic moves from desktop to mobile. Keep up with the latest innovations, make sure your web host delivers the speed you need, and make sure you’re following all seven of these best practices for speeding up your website . Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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10 Things You Can Do With Google Search Console

Posted on June 7, 2018 by Hosting

The post 10 Things You Can Do With Google Search Console appeared first on HostGator Blog . 10 Things You Can Do With Google Search Console If you have a website, Google’s free webmaster tools are invaluable resources that you should be taking advantage of. Chances are, you already know about and regularly use Google Analytics , but if you haven’t yet, you should add Google Search Console to your list of go-to Google resources to help you get more from your business website as well. How to Set Up Google Search Console To start, go to the Google Search Console . To access it, you’ll be required to log in with your Google account – make sure you use the same one here you use for any other Google Webmaster tools you use. Once you’re logged in, look for the red button that says Add a Property. Enter the html for your website and click the button. From there, Google may ask you to verify you’re the owner of the website. There are a few different ways you can do this . If you’re already using Google Analytics, then the easiest option will be to choose Google Analytics Tracking Code as your preferred method of verification. As long as your Google Analytics tracking code is in the section of your homepage, you’ll be in with no problem. When you’re on the homepage of the Google Search Console, notice a link on the top left that says “Try the new Search Console”. You currently have two options for using the tool: the old, traditional one which keeps more of the functionality; and the newer version Google’s rolling out that has a more intuitive visual design, but fewer of the features and functionality of the older version. Over time, Google plans to move all the Search Console’s features into the newer version, but for now, a lot of the benefits of the tool remain in the traditional version. In the images below, the old version is on the left and the new version is on the right: 10 Ways to Use Google Search Console With access to the Google Search Console, you can now get to work accomplishing a number of different tasks. Here are some of the most important ways to use it.   1. Submit a sitemap. While Google’s web crawlers can learn a lot about a website and its individual web pages on their own, you can give them a little extra help in learning the information they need by submitting a sitemap to Google. A number of websites will automatically generate a sitemap for you. Once you have it, loading it to the Google Search Console is extremely easy. In the traditional version, while on the main page of the dashboard, look on the right side of the screen to see the Sitemaps section. Click on the gray bar that says Sitemaps. Then find the red Add/Test Sitemaps button in the top right corner of the screen. Click on it and fill in the URL for your website’s sitemap. In the new dashboard, click on Sitemaps in the menu on the left side of the page, then fill in the sitemap URL where instructed. 2. Learn common keywords people use to find you. Anyone that finds your website through search used a specific search term to get there. Google Search Console shows you the most common keywords bringing people to your website. In the traditional Google Search Console view, you’ll find this information by clicking on the Search Analytics bar in the middle of the page in the main dashboard. A little bit down the page, you’ll see the list of all the keywords people found you with and the number of times someone has clicked on your link after searching each keyword. By clicking on a particular keyword in the list and using the filter options in the top menu, you can go a little deeper to learn which pages show up for the specific keyword, what countries people are coming from when they search the keyword, and what devices they’re using. And you can see how different keywords fare in terms of clicks, impressions, and click-through rate. In the new Google Search Console, you’ll find the same information by clicking on Performance either in the left-side menu or in the top box in the main dashboard. In this version, Google shows you both the number of clicks each keyword earns you and the number of total times your website shows up in search for that keyword (impressions) on the main page, and you can view the other categories (CTR, position) by clicking on the upside-down triangle above the list. This information shows you if you’re successfully attracting people based on the keywords targeted in your SEO strategy. And it will reveal any keywords people find you with that you weren’t meaning to target at all.   3. Identify your most popular pages. Every website will have pages that perform better in the search engines than others. Google Search Console will help you determine which of your web pages is bringing the most people to your website. You can find your most popular pages in the same section you found the keywords, and filtering and viewing different subsets of data works pretty much the same. In both versions of the site, in the same Search Analytics section you viewed the keywords in, select Pages in the menu. You’ll see a list of all the pages people have seen and clicked in descending order of popularity, with your best-performing pages right at the top. The default view in the old version shows you the most popular pages in terms of clicks; in the new version, clicks and impressions. You can also see which perform best in terms of click-through rate and position as well.   4. See where your visitors are coming from. If your business serves a particular part of the world, then it’s more important to get traffic from visitors that live in a set geographic area than anywhere else. Google Search Console will also provide you data on where your visitors are located, so you can make sure you’re reaching the right people. This is in the same section as the keywords and pages data. In both versions, select Countries in the menu. You’ll see the number of clicks your website receives from each country, with the highest numbers at the top of the list. As with the other categories, you can also switch to view the results based on impressions, click-through rate, and search ranking position.   5. Learn which devices they use. By now, every business should have a mobile-friendly website . But even if you’ve already taken steps to make sure your website looks good on mobile devices, it’s still good to know what portion of your visitors are interacting with your website on each different type of device. The Google Search Console has you covered there. This is the last piece of data we’ll find in the same section as the last three. In both versions, select Devices in the menu. You can see here the distribution of how many clicks you get on each type of device and you can switch over to see the number of impressions, click-through rate, and average position as desired (you know this song and dance by now). Note that this is the last item on our list that you’ll find in both versions of the product. For the rest, at least at the time of this writing, you’ll be sticking with the traditional version of the Google Search Console.   6. Check that your website works well on mobile. While it’s a good idea to do mobile testing on your website on your own, you can also use the Google Search Console to confirm that your website passes their mobile usability standards. In the Search Traffic section on the left-side menu, select Mobile Usability. If everything about your site looks good to Google based on their standards for mobile usability, you’ll see a green checkmark telling you that no errors are detected. If it identifies something about your website that doesn’t work well on mobile, such as the use of flash or a small font size, you’ll get a message in this section letting you know what the problem is so you can work on fixing it.   7. See which sites link to you. For anyone focused on SEO, this is important information to have access to. Backlinks are one of the biggest ranking factors, so every time another authoritative website links to you it increases your website’s authority in the eyes of Google’s algorithm. Under Search Traffic in the left-side menu, select Links to Your Site. You’ll see a list of websites that include a link on their website back to yours, as well as a list of the pages on your website that other sites link to the most.  Under the section labeled “How your data is linked,” you can also see the anchor text other sites use most often when linking back to yours. You can find more information on each backlink by clicking on the website, and then clicking on the link listed. From there, you can see specific pages that include the link and visit them yourself to see how it’s used. 8. Check for broken links. Broken links provide a bad experience for your users and lead people away from the functioning pages you want them to be on. As if that wasn’t bad enough, they also make you look bad to Google and can have a negative effect on your rankings. In the Crawl section of the Google Search Console, you can find details on any errors Google found when crawling your website, including all URLs that returned a 404 error . If you click on each entry, you can find information on what the problem with the link is and where the link is located both on your website and others. This is valuable information you can use to improve your website experience and cut out any frustrating errors your visitors may be dealing with now.   9. Identify website security issues. Big website hacks are in the news every day lately it seems. Even if your business isn’t big enough to make the news if you get hacked, it can still cause you serious problems. And that goes double if you have an ecommerce site that collects sensitive customer data like credit card information. The Google Search Console provides a quick and easy head’s up if your website has a security flaw you should be aware of. Click on the Security Issues option on the left-side menu. If you don’t have anything to worry about, the Console will let you know. If Google does spot an issue, you’ll learn the details you need to figure out how to fix it here.   10. Confirm your schema markup or structured data is working. Finally, if you use schema markup or other structured data on your website, Google can confirm for you whether it’s set up right to work in the SERPs. Under Search Appearance, you’ll find categories for Structured Data, Rich Cards, and Data Highlighter, all of which are methods you can use to communicate more information to Google’s crawlers about how to display your web pages in the search results. The Console provides details on whether or not you have all your coding set up right for these categories, or if you need to make changes.   Conclusion The Google Search Console is entirely free and, as you can see, thoroughly packed with useful information for any business website. If you care about where and how you show up in the search engines, this is your best resource for digging into the data available and making an action plan for how to improve your SEO moving forward. Discover how HostGator’s expert SEO services can help your search rankings. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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10 Ways to Optimize Your Blog Posts for SEO

Posted on May 11, 2018 by Hosting

The post 10 Ways to Optimize Your Blog Posts for SEO appeared first on HostGator Blog . How to Optimize Your Blog Posts for SEO Blogging for SEO is pretty much a no brainer. Publishing regular blog posts gives you opportunities to target a large number of long-tail keywords, keeps people on your website longer, and gives other websites something to link back to. Getting your blog up and producing content for it are both important steps, but you can make that work go much further for your SEO efforts by taking a few extra steps to optimize your blog posts for SEO. While you should generally prioritize writing for your audience rather than search engines, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t useful steps you can take to make your posts go further with the search engines. 1. Do Keyword Research. Keyword research should be one of the first steps you take in developing a blog strategy for SEO because it helps you figure out the types of topics your audience is interested in. For each blog post you write, it’s smart to have a primary keyword or two in mind, along with a few similar or related secondary keywords. You’ll want to use these in the post where relevant, but only when it makes natural sense to do so. Don’t ever try to force a keyword in where it doesn’t work –the search engines frown on keyword stuffing and you could be penalized. And with Google’s use of latent semantic indexing (LSI) , it’s less important than it used to be to use exact keywords in lieu of synonyms or similar terms. But having those keywords in mind and using them as you write is still worth it, as long as you don’t go overboard. A couple of useful tips for doing blogging keyword research: Go for long-tail keywords – One or two-word phrases are often very competitive and hard to rank for, so relevant longer phrases or questions are more worth your time. As an example, targeting a broad keyword like “seo” in a blog post makes less sense than getting more specific, like “small business local seo.” Think about voice search .  As more people use Siri and Alexa, optimizing your content for voice search becomes more important. And since voice search is a newer development in SEO that not all businesses are thinking about, it’s a good way to be competitive.   2. Check for Rich Results in the SERP. Once you have your target keywords in mind, head to Google and do some searches for them. Many types of searches now include rich results on the search engine results page (SERP). If a search for your target keyword produces a featured snippet above the organic results, or if many of the organic results include images, video thumbnails, or other rich information, then you want to make sure you’re optimizing your content to compete for those things. In some cases, that means adding schema markup to your webpage. In others, it means changing the way you structure your content to try to compete for the featured snippet .  Either way, you need to know what you’re competing for and against in order to create the right kind of content to be competitive.   3. Choose Your Post Title Well. One of the main parts of the page the search engines pay attention to in trying to understand what the page is about is the title. That makes it an important opportunity for you to communicate your topic by using your primary target keyword. Make sure you include it in a way that makes sense. If you shoehorn it in so that it’s confusing for your human readers, the lack of clicks you get will hurt your SEO chances more than use of the keyword will help them. But since your post will be covering the topic of your keyword, finding a natural way to include it shouldn’t be too difficult.   4. Include the Keyword in Your URL. The page URL is another important place to include your target keyword. It’s another part of the page search engines look at to figure out how to understand what the page is and, as such, is an important ranking factor. Always customize the URL before publishing. A blog post on how to find good winter boots should therefore have a URL like www.shoewebsite.com/blog/winter-boots. 5. Optimize Your Headings. You may be sensing a theme here. Your page headings are another part of the page that search engines give weight to in figuring out what your page is about. That means that, once again, you want to look for opportunities to (naturally) include your keywords in the page heading. That includes anything that has a , , or tag on the page. Headings are often a good place for those secondary keywords you have in mind, since it probably won’t make sense to use your primary keyword in every heading on the page.   6. Use Your Image Text. Another page element that search engines pay attention to is the text behind your images . The name of your image (e.g. keyword.jpg) and the alt text you can fill in are two more places you can include your primary keyword on the page. 7. Use Relevant Internal Links. Links are easily one of the most important ranking signals for the search engine algorithms. Getting other websites to link to yours is a challenge, but you have the power to do as much relevant internal linking on your own site as possible. Each time you write a new post, think about any blog posts you’ve already published that are relevant to what you’re writing now. Wherever it makes sense to do so, add in those links and, if you can do so naturally, use anchor text that relates to your target keyword for the older post you’re linking to.   8. Write a Meta Description. While meta descriptions don’t affect how your website ranks, they do influence what people see when they’re browsing their options on the search engine results page. If they’re trying to decide between a few links on the page, a strong description that uses the keywords they searched for (which show up in bold on the SERP) could make the difference in their choosing to click on yours. Google will display up to around 300 characters on the SERP in the description field, so figure out how to describe what’s on your page (using your target keyword) within a couple of lines here.   9. Link Your New Post to Old Posts. For all the same reasons you look for opportunities to add old links from your blog to new posts, you should periodically review your old posts to look for opportunities to link to posts that were published later. One way you can do this is by doing a search of your own site for the target keyword of each new post you create. When you find uses of that keyword or similar terms in your old posts, you can add in a link to the new.   10. Choose Tags and Categories Strategically. Blogs allow you to create tags and categories that help you group related posts together. This is both a useful navigational aid for people browsing your blog and a tool you can use strategically for SEO. Every category or tag you use creates a new page that will include the name of the tag or category in the URL, along with a lot of relevant content and links on the page. As with keyword stuffing, you don’t want to overdo it here and create tons of tags with similar keywords, but you should think carefully about which keywords and tags will be the most valuable to readers and for your SEO strategy. Come up with a list of a few based on the most important keywords you want to rank for, but making sure they each represent different types of topics (e.g. don’t have categories for synonyms or slight variations on terms) and use them whenever they’re relevant to what you’ve written.   Optimize Every Blog Post for SEO   Your blog is one of your most important and powerful SEO tools. Every blog post you publish presents a number of opportunities to strengthen your website’s search authority. Don’t waste any opportunity you have to use your posts to their fullest SEO potential. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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Advanced SEO Tips for Bloggers

Posted on April 30, 2018 by Hosting

The post Advanced SEO Tips for Bloggers appeared first on HostGator Blog . Advanced SEO Tips for Bloggers If you wanted to write for yourself, you could keep a journal. You blog because you want other people to connect with what you have to say, or because you know it’s a valuable way to promote your website. Either way, you need other people to find you. You already know the SEO basics – to include keywords in your titles and headings, fill out your meta description, and promote your work on social media. But to truly stand out in the competitive world of online content, you need to move toward more advanced SEO tips. Here are a few important advanced SEO tips to start including in your blogging strategy. 1. Make Keyword Research Part of Your Planning. Regular bloggers know how important it is to plan a calendar out in advance. If you don’t take the time to plan out topics and deadlines for yourself, you’ll have a hard time staying consistent in your publishing. Each time you sit down to plan out your calendar for the coming weeks, spend some time doing keyword research to see what topics your audience is thinking about, and the language they use when looking for information on those topics. There are a number of useful tools you can use for this. Google’s Keyword Planner is free and uses the data the company collects on what people are searching for in the most popular search engine in the world. It supplies both information on roughly how often people search for specific keyword terms and similar keywords people use to the ones you provide. You can also find phrases people commonly use by paying attention to the similar searches Google provides in the “People also ask” and “Searches related to” sections on the search engine results page. 2. Focus on Long-Tail Keyword Opportunities. Obviously, you’d love to rank for the general keywords that broadly describe what you do on your blog. If you provide health advice, then showing up when people search “health advice” would mean so many people find you. But if you do a search for that term, you’ll notice you’re competing with some serious bigwigs. Your blog probably isn’t going to unseat Harvard Health, WebMD, and Healthline for those top spots. But when you think about it, a lot of the people searching for health advice aren’t going to use that sort of general term – they’re looking for specific information, like “best exercises for high cholesterol” or “foods to improve digestion.” These more detailed, specific searches are called long-tail keywords and for the vast majority of websites seeking to improve their SEO, they’re the most important keywords to focus on targeting in your efforts. They’re less competitive, so you have a better chance of showing up on page one and actually grabbing some of the traffic for that term.   3. Do SERP Research for Every Topic You Blog About. Not all search engine results pages look the same. With the recent rise in rich results , some searches produce a simple list of links, some include answer boxes up top, some have product ads at the top of the results page, and some have a map of local results that dominate the page. Knowing what the search results page looks like for the term you’re targeting is crucial for knowing how best to optimize your blog posts to land the best spots on the page and make sure your content stands out once you do.   4. Optimize for Rich Results When Relevant. If your SERP research reveals keywords that do bring up rich results, the approach you take when optimizing your content should be based on the specific type of results that win that page. In some cases, that will mean using schema markup to help your content stand out in the main list of results, in other cases it will mean optimizing your blog post to aim for the featured snippet . Either way, you have to know what you’re targeting in order to know how to take the best approach to achieve it.   5. Optimize Your Images for SEO. Blogs can’t be all about text. Every blog post you publish should include at least one image, and sometimes more. For people better with words than visuals, that can be a challenge, but it’s important that you not only take time to find good images for your blog , but that you also use them as an opportunity to do further search engine optimization on your page. Every image you include in a blog post gives you extra opportunities to add your keyword to the page. You can use the alt text, the image file name, and possibly the caption text (if you can do so naturally and in a way useful to visitors) to insert uses of your keyword onto the page. That’s a few more ways to signal to Google what the page is about.   6. Guest Post on Relevant Blogs. The hardest part of SEO is getting other websites to link back to yours. One of the best ways for bloggers to build links back to theirr blog is to create valuable content for related websites. It can require a lot of work (you already know good content takes work), but it gives you a way to reach a new audience and improve your website’s SEO authority. Identify a few blogs that cover topics similar to or complementary to what you write about and find out if they accept guest posts. Then take some time to get familiar with the types of posts they publish and topics that are most popular with their readers, before coming up with a blog post idea to pitch and write for them. Be prepared to get some rejections, particularly if you’re targeting blogs that have a huge readership. But every guest post you land will introduce your blog to a new audience and provide you with linking opportunities back to your own blog. Just make sure you don’t overdo it so your post doesn’t look spammy – stick with one or two relevant links back.   7. Add Internal Links to Your Old Posts. Internal links aren’t as valuable as external ones, but they’re still an important SEO tactic. Most bloggers know by now to look for opportunities to link back to old posts when you’re writing new ones, but how often do you think to revisit your old posts to look for opportunities to link to new posts that have been published since? Now and then, search your website for the main keywords you had in mind for your recent posts. Anywhere in old posts where you used those keywords or similar ones, add a link to the newer posts with the keyword as anchor text. It’s a pretty simple step that can make a real difference.   8. Update Old Posts to Keep Them Current. Creating new content regularly takes a lot of work. But you can make the work you’ve already done go further by periodically reviewing your blog to find old posts that are good, but may now be outdated. Beef these up with updated information and valuable tips or insights you missed the first time around. This is especially useful to do for posts that rank okay, but not great. So anything you’re on page 2 or 3 for is worth improving upon so you can try to make it good enough for page one.   9. Feature Influencers in Your Blog Posts. As with guest posts, finding ways to collaborate with influencers is a useful way to expose your blog to a wider audience. That could mean doing an interview with them, featuring a quote from them, pointing out an example of something they do well in a blog post, or referring back to advice they provided on their site (with a link).   By featuring them, you can get on their radar and may be able to get them to share your blog post with their audience, potentially bringing you new views and followers.   10. Try Out Different Content Formats. While blogging is primarily associated with writing, it’s a format that is much more flexible than that. You can include images, videos, infographics, and podcasts on a blog if you want. Branching out into new content types may be just the thing to help you reach a new audience or connect with your current audience in new ways. Experiment a bit to see how you like working with new formats and whether or not they result in more shares, more links back to your posts, or more engagement from your audience. Any content format that does is worth creating more of.   Conclusion Blogging is one of the best things anyone can do to improve SEO, but simply having a blog and publishing posts isn’t enough to keep you competitive. Creating regular content that’s always good is the hardest part though. By doing a little extra work to make the hard work you’re already doing go further, you can help your audience find you more easily and ensure your content does its job. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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What Is A Mobile Friendly Website?

Posted on March 12, 2018 by Hosting

The post What Is A Mobile Friendly Website? appeared first on HostGator Blog . What Is A Mobile Friendly Website? Spend some time researching how to build a website and you’ll see terms like mobile-optimized, mobile-friendly, and “mobile first.” Mobile is a hot topic in website design because we do most of our searching and a lot of our shopping on our phones now, but most websites were built with desktop users in mind. Mobile users need sites that work well on small screens, use touch controls, are easy to navigate, and load fast. What does your site need to be mobile-friendly ? Let’s go over the basics.   What Does a Mobile-Friendly Website Look Like? Let’s focus first on the way a mobile-friendly site looks, because visitors will decide at a glance whether they want to stay on your site based on its appearance. There are four basic elements a good mobile-friendly template or custom design will include: 1. Responsive Page Display Responsive design is the foundation of a mobile-friendly website. Without it, a smartphone or tablet user who visits your site will see a miniaturized version of your desktop site, which means they’ll have to scroll vertically and horizontally to find anything—and that means they’ll just leave and go somewhere else. A responsive site design, whether custom-built or based on a template, automatically displays your site properly on whatever type of device a visitor is using, whether they’re using it in portrait or landscape orientation. 2. Readable Fonts Mobile friendly templates will include fonts that are easy for mobile users to read, but you may want to play around a bit with the fonts, especially if you have a logo that uses a particular typeface. Sans serif fonts with clean lines are generally the easiest to read on mobile devices, where glare and screen size can make serif fonts and novelty fonts like script hard to see clearly. And go up a size on your fonts—no one wants to try to read tiny text, even if it’s sans serif. 3. Proper Text Formatting. Keep your blocks of text short and break them up with headlines and bulleted lists when it makes sense to include them. It’s hard for our eyes to track close-together lines of text on small screens, so big paragraphs make it more likely that your visitors will lose their place and get frustrated. 4. Optimized Media Display. Test your images, infographics, and videos to make sure they look right on phones and tablets, without requiring users to scroll or resize their display to see your media.   What Does Mobile-Friendly Navigation Mean? Once your mobile visitors arrive, how will they find what they need? Mobile friendly navigation factors in the hardware and user-interface differences between desktops and mobile devices. Think Touches and Taps Rather Than Mouse Clicks. Websites designed for desktop users are easiest to navigate with mouse clicks, not swipes, taps, and touches. There’s no mouse on a smartphone, so you’ll need to give mobile users a way to navigate using touch controls. Reduce the Need for Data Entry. Trying to type on a smartphone keyboard is just the worst. Between the tiny keys, random auto-corrects, and auto-fills that may or may not populate fields correctly, it’s something most mobile users prefer to avoid. Voice-to-text isn’t much better, and it’s not always an option (say, on the train during morning rush hour). Organize your mobile site so people can find what they need without having to type in the search field, or contact with you without filling out a contact form. Shorten the Distance from Point A to Point B. Flat site architecture is your friend, because it helps mobile shoppers find things on your site without having to tap through too many layers along the way. A retailer that does this well is 6pm.com. Their store contains a vast number of items, but the mobile site’s menus and filters are easy to access, so it only takes a few taps to go from the home page to sandals in my size. The mobile site also offers visitors the option to download a lightweight (17 MB) app, which offers a modular menu design that’s easy to read on a phone.     How Fast Does a Mobile-Friendly Website Need to Be? Faster is always better. A mobile-optimized template or design that streamlines the number of requests a user’s browser makes to load your site, plus a web hosting service that loads your pages fast, will go a long way toward making your site more mobile-friendly. Want to see how your site fares now and track improvements? You can use Google’s PageSpeed tools to compare how quickly your site loads on mobile and desktop devices . There’s also a Mobile-Friendly testing tool that evaluates speed plus other elements. Both of these tools give you a list of tips to make your site faster and more mobile-friendly, along with links to resources to help you make those changes. Want to really speed things up? An accelerated mobile page (AMP) is a lightweight app-like tool that’s easy to build and use. The AMP was created to help solve the problem of laggy load times on mobile devices, and if your current mobile site isn’t performing well on Google’s page and mobile tests, an AMP may be the answer.   How Does a Mobile-Friendly Website Help Your Business? All the work you put into making your site mobile-friendly can pay off in the form of more business. Google says that 94% of American smartphone users “ search for local information on their phones,” even if they have access to a desktop. And when people are searching for local businesses, they’re usually ready to make a purchase . By making your site easy to find and easy to use on mobile devices, you’re more likely to earn their business. To rank well in local searches, claim your Google My Business listing and make sure you’re following other SEO best practices .   Build Your Mobile-Friendly Website Get started on your mobile-friendly site today with the HostGator Website Builder . Choose from over 100 mobile-friendly templates! Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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