Bad design can hurt website performance in many ways. The design can be bad for many reasons. It can look unprofessional, outdated, unfinished, or difficult to use. But a badly designed website will also look bad on mobile devices.

The question is: “Why does my website look bad on mobile?”

Your website looks bad on mobile because it doesn’t have a responsive design, has large images or slow loading scripts, or it’s hosted on a cheap hosting account.

Your website looks Bad on mobile because of the design

If your website looks bad on mobile, it’s most likely because of the design. For a website to look good on mobile, it needs a responsive or mobile-optimized design.

With a mobile design, your site will work well on any screen or display, regardless of size. Smartphone browsers are pretty good at displaying websites. But, that is only true for websites built the right way.

Websites with old designs are either unusable on mobile devices or look like sites on desktop computers. But, if your site is mobile optimized, it automatically shrinks or expands fit any screen size. The mobile design allows site visitors to pan and zoom around the content.

If you want to check if your site is responsive, you can easily check it using your cell phone. You can also check your site using your desktop computer or laptop.

Open your site in a browser on your desktop computer. Then, shrink the window size until it is only about five inches wide. If your site adjusts to the changing browser site, you are looking at a responsive website.

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Your website looks bad on mobile because it cannot scale

If your website looks bad on mobile, it’s because it cannot scale to mobile screens.

Even if your website works on a cell phone, that doesn’t mean it’s optimized for smartphones. Mobile phones have high-resolution screens, and they require extra information from sites. Phone need instructions on stretching or shrinking your website content for maximum visibility.

On your cell phone, if you’re seeing your responsive or mobile website, but parts of it look out of proportion, your website is missing the code that keeps website elements in proportion.

Your website looks bad on mobile because large images

If your website looks bad on mobile, it’s because the images are not optimized for mobile. Large images will result in a bad user experience because they slow server load times.

A slow loading page will increase the bounce rate and result in poor conversion rates.

For most mobile users, the mobile network connection on their phone is much slower than their wifi connection speed. That’s one of the main reasons your website shouldn’t use large images.

Before you upload an image, make sure it has been compressed. Small images will speed up your site for mobile and desktop users.

Mobile-optimized images will improve the overall performance of your website.

Is your website benefiting from the recent explosion in mobile usage?

Just in case you haven’t realized it yet, mobile is where it’s at. Mobile is not only changing how we interact with each other, but it’s also changing how we interact with websites.

Your website looks bad on mobile because the content isn’t formatted correctly

Format your content correctly to make your website mobile friendly.

Have you ever tried to read a long paragraph on a cell phone? It’s extremely hard on the eyes. You get lost in the wall of text on your phone’s display.

Incorrectly formatted text negatively impacts mobile usability. It tires the reader and drives them away from your site. Remember, not just the design but the formatting of content will influence the mobile user experience.

Mobile optimized website content is scannable content. Therefore, it’s important to format website text for easy reading.

Here’s how to mobile optimize website content:

  • Keep paragraphs short – Each paragraph should contain no more than three sentences. Keep each paragraph short and sweet.
  • Divide content into subtitles – The subtitles should include your target keywords. The H1 tag should include the most important keyword phrase.
  • Bold the most important content – Bolding will help your readers, and it may also help with your SEO.
  • Use bullet points – Bullet points offer an easy way to organize information

Why does your website need to be mobile-friendly?

If you have not made the necessary adjustments for the mobile age, you will probably miss out on many sales due to reduced web traffic. Before 2006, mobile traffic was virtually non-existent. With the advent of the iPhone and the subsequent smartphone and tablet boom that occurred in the following years, a whole new type of web traffic was born.

Today, the majority of web traffic comes from mobile users and if you have not started targeting these users, you are certainly making a huge mistake.

In fact, major retailers such as Walmart experienced over a 50% increase in mobile customers during last year’s holiday shopping season. If you are running a small business, you need to be ready to take advantage of mobile traffic more than ever before.

How do I make my website look good on mobile?

You can make your website look good on mobile with the following steps:

  • Create a responsive website design. Mobile-friendly design shouldn’t be an afterthought. Mobile usability should be a top priority during every part of your website redesign project.
  • Make sure your site scales to fit any screen size. Your website should be usable on any screen size, from a small cell phone screen to a giant TV screen.
  • Optimize images for mobile performance. Reducing image size while maintaining acceptable quality is a key objective of making your website mobile friendly.
  • Always test your website on various mobile devices before going live.

How do I optimize my website for mobile devices?

Optimizing your website for mobile devices requires multiple elements.

The key areas of website optimization for mobile devices are:

  • Reducing page load times – More than 50% of visitors will click off your site if it takes more than a couple of seconds to load.
  • Improved site navigation – This is especially important since Google has introduced mobile-first indexing. Your website’s menu should expand and collapse on slide, touch or fly out.
  • Improved page layout – Ensure your site has the correct padding and spacing.
  • Fast loading content – All mobile-friendly sites are fast to load.
  • Decrease element sizes (images, text, buttons, etc.) – You should reduce the overall page size to make your site look good on mobile.
  • Touch elements – Mobile optimized sites use touch commands while visitors browse them.

Your priority is to create the best possible experience on mobile devices, which helps to focus on the limitations of these devices. You’ve got limited screen space to work with, slower data connections and all users must navigate and interact with your site with their fingers.

The key components of a mobile-friendly website are speed, visibility, and navigation.

Everything you learned about SEO is still true today:

  • Keywords are a must –  The right keywords.
  • Content must be original and high quality – Forget about fluff or boring corporate talk.
  • Images should be properly tagged
  • Each web page needs a great meta description

All of the above are essential to gaining the attention of major search engines.

But to capture and maintain more traffic from mobile sources, you will need to start doing much more.

Contact us now! We can help you get your website mobile ready.

Pick the Right Layout

Mobile users tend to scan through websites differently than non-mobile Internet users. This difference can mostly be attributed to the difference in screen size. A lot of mobile users are on small, handheld screens rather than large monitors. This means you need to start designing your pages to fit the screens most users will use. The best way to do this is to have a responsive website designed for your business.

While banners and buttons that take up the entire screen’s width do not make sense for users accessing pages on a desktop computer, this type of layout is highly appealing for mobile web browsers. A mobile user will not be able to scan around a webpage like a desktop user can, so making navigation easier will help bring users back for more visits.

Content Presentation

If you think about what mobile users are doing when they are browsing the Internet, they will most likely be on the go and looking for a quick, easy-to-find solution. These users will not be prepared to read huge blocks of text, nor will they want to waste time searching around a page for what they need. They are more likely to press the back button to return to Google search results and move on to a different website.

Therefore, your content needs to be organized in a mobile friendly way:

  • Forget word count and avoid long chunks of text – Break your text content into small 2-3 sentence chunks.
  • Separate paragraphs with informative headlines so the reader can jump right to what is important for them.
  • Use large titles and subtitles.
  • Present your content in bulleted lists and bring attention to the take-home message.
  • Create a slide show. Providing a visual presentation of your content will make your webpage more appealing to the on-the-go user.
  • Use small file size mobile optimized images.

Contact us now! We can help you get your website mobile ready.

Use Video Content

Mobile users love watching videos, and if you are aiming to get more mobile traffic, you have to give the users what they want.

A lot of businesses are still avoiding the use of video content, which is much to their own demise.

As I said before, mobile users want information quickly while on the go. And since mobile screens are much smaller than monitors, a mobile user will be more likely to watch a video rather than read an article.

However, video content needs to be done right. Mobile users need information quickly, so they are unlikely to watch a lengthy movie. Keep it short and keep it simple. No one wants to watch a video that takes 5 minutes to say something that could be said in just 2 minutes. Your video should also be supplemented with text headlines. Again, do not write out a book in your video. Instead, use headlines and bullet points that are essential to your message. Your mobile users will thank you for it.

Social Media Presence

One of the biggest mistakes made today is not building a brand presence on social media websites. Mobile users love using social media because it offers a quick and easy way to access not only people, but also entertainment, news, and businesses. Maintaining a social media account can build a community and a following just for your brand. As a result, you will be able to maintain constant contact with your followers.

This will take quite a bit of effort to begin, but once your following is established, maintaining it will be easy. The key to building and maintaining your brand community lies in drawing attention to high-quality posts by presenting your content with a catchy and intriguing headline. Your headline must be able to hook your reader with something interesting and entice them to open your content to get them on your website.

Videos are excellent options for posting on social media. The Facebook newsfeed provides a default setting that automatically plays videos without sound on the mobile users’ screen. As long as you design your videos for this audience, you can capture their attention as they scroll through their newsfeed. Of course, your content will need to be visually appealing and make sense without sound to draw the attention of mobile users successfully.

But not only do you have to get the mobile traffic to your website, but you must also keep them there and provide a reason for them to come back. So before you start to begin driving more mobile traffic to your website, be sure you have optimized each and every one of your pages to accommodate the mobile user: choose a mobile-friendly layout; present your content for mobile traffic by using headlines, avoiding long chunks of text, and using bulleted lists when possible; and provide useful concise video content.