What is Mobile Optimisation?

Making sure your website is optimised for mobiles is extremely important. But what does it actually mean?

2015 was the year the world went mobile… Well, actually it was 2014 when the number of global mobile users surpassed that of desktop users†, but 2015 was the year that people really started paying attention.

World wide user stats are not for everybody, what's really important to you is what your visitors are using. In the industry we use the term mobile moment, as it sounds, this is the moment in which your mobile users overtake that of your desktop users.

Lots of companies around the world have already gone past their mobile moment, some without even noticing it. This means that a lot of customers have over 50% of their visits from a mobile device, but a lot of them don't have a website that's optimised for mobile.

If this is you, you're making things unnecessarily difficult for over 50% of your customers.

"Designing for today’s Web means considering single-handed thumb use on smartphones."
Luke Wroblewski

But the real benefit of optimising your website for mobile is you’re making it future friendly. Although people are starting to use the term mobile optimisation, it doesn’t look far enough into the future, so in the industry, we use the term responsive web design, or just responsive.

Responsive is too big a topic to explain in this post, but the overarching explanation would be to build websites that adapt to the size of the screen the user is using. This means that your website is as beautiful and easy to use on your mobile phone as it is on your desktop computer. But it also means it’s as beautiful and easy to use on a smart watch, tablet, laptop, smart fridge, widescreen tv, that little screen in the front of your car… you get the picture. It should look, feel and work great on any screen, any size, any time.

Making your site responsive is difficult, some people see responsive as being able to resize the website, and it still working:

This isn't responsive, this is just having a fluid website. Responsive is making sure your users can enjoy your website on every device. But it's also; Making sure the navigation fits, the screen isn't too busy, the buttons are big enough for people's fingers, ensuring the website loads fast on a slow connection and much much more.

Mobile optimisation, responsive, or whatever you want to call it, is hard, but the best way to learn is to test your ideas, see what works with your visitors. Because they are the most important people to your business.

† http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Presentations-and-Whitepapers/2014/The-US-Mobile-App-Report