What Is Mobile Optimisation?

Date First Published: 5th February 2023

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: Web Design

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty Level: 5/10

Learn more about what mobile optimisation is in this article.

Mobile optimisation is the process of creating websites that work well on mobile devices. As the number of users browsing websites using mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets has increased, mobile optimisation is becoming more important and has become a responsibility for every website owner.

Without a mobile-friendly website, websites will not perform well on mobile devices. This may lead to users quickly bouncing off the website and will decrease conversions and sales. This could harm the reputation of a business. Mobile optimisation is essential for website owners and organisations that want to create high-quality websites and not exclude visitors from using their online services. By optimising the design and content of a website for mobile devices, it ensures that all users have a decent user experience, regardless of which device they use to browse the website.

Requirements For A Mobile-Friendly Website

The requirements for a mobile-friendly website include:

• Large enough text. The text should be readable on mobile devices without having to zoom in. All other elements of the page have to be optimised so that users do not have to zoom in or horizontally scroll to read the text.
• Sufficient space between elements. There needs to be a sufficient amount of space between the elements of a website, including the buttons, links, content boxes, and navigation bars so that they can easily be touched by a finger without touching the wrong element.
• Responsive web design. With responsive web design, webpages will automatically adapt to the visitor’s screen size and width without user interaction.
• Separate mobile version of the website. The second option is to develop a separate mobile version of a website. Most websites use responsive web design, eliminating the need for web developers to develop specific display sizes for smaller devices. The mobile version of a website has its own URL, such as 'm.example.com'. Disadvantages of having a separate mobile version of a website are that it can lead to duplicate content issues by search engines and the device the visitor is using to browse the website will not always have approximately the same page width as the mobile design, becoming an issue if different devices with different screen sizes are used to browse the website.

SEO

Optimising websites for mobile devices is important for SEO as mobile-friendliness is a minor Google ranking factor. This is because Google doesn't want to send mobile users to websites that provide a poor browsing experience for them. Google often tests websites for mobile-friendliness and gives website owners notifications if any webpages do not perform well on mobile devices (e.g. the webpages scrunch up or the text is too small on mobile devices.). For example, if Google saw a website and a competitor's website of the same relevance to a search query, the more mobile-friendly page of those two will rank higher.

Mobile Optimisation Tools

Google provides a useful tool for website owners to check whether their pages are mobile-friendly. This includes the Google mobile-friendly test which will test how easy it is to use a page on mobile devices and returns a list of issues found once the test has finished.