Mobile-Friendly Web Design in Nixa, MO

Most of your visitors are holding a phone

For a local service business, well over half of visits come from a phone, and for some trades it is closer to three quarters. Somebody standing in a flooded kitchen is not opening a laptop.

Yet most sites are designed on a large monitor, signed off on a large monitor, and never properly looked at on a handset. The owner sees the version almost nobody else sees.

That is how a site ends up with a phone number that is not tappable, a menu that needs three taps to reach the one page people want, and a hero image that pushes every word below the fold.

Designing at phone width first

Start narrow and the hard decisions happen early. There is only room for one message above the fold, so you have to decide what it is. On a wide screen you can dodge that choice and put four things side by side.

Once the narrow version works, widening it out is straightforward. Going the other way almost never works, which is why a desktop design squeezed down afterward feels cramped and arbitrary.

The result is a page that says what you do and where, with a way to call you, in the first screen. Everything else is below that for the people who want more.

Thumbs are not mouse pointers

Tap targets have to be big enough to hit while walking. A link that is fine with a mouse pointer is a frustration with a thumb, and two links a few pixels apart means hitting the wrong one.

Phone numbers get wrapped so one tap starts the call. The address links through to directions. These are small things that take minutes and they are missing from a surprising number of local sites.

Forms get the keyboard right: a number pad for a phone field, an email keyboard for an email field, and as few fields as the job honestly needs. Every extra field loses people.

A phone on a weak signal is the real test

Phones are often on patchy mobile data rather than good broadband. A page that opens instantly on your office connection can take many seconds on a phone two streets away from a tower.

Most of that weight is images. A photo straight off a camera is several megabytes and the page needs a fraction of that, so sizing images properly is usually the single biggest speed fix available.

There is money in this rather than just impatience. The gap between a page that opens in two seconds and one that takes eight is measured in inquiries you never hear about, because the person left before the page finished and you have no record of them.

Test it the way a customer meets it

On a real phone, not a shrunken browser window. On mobile data with the office wifi turned off. Starting from a search result rather than by typing the address, because that is how people actually arrive.

Then do the thing a customer would do. Find the price, find the service area, call the number. If any of those takes more than a few seconds, that is the fix list.

You can run that test on your current site this afternoon for free, and it tells you more than any report will. Then look at the web design side of what we do if the list comes back long.

Google looks at the phone version

Google indexes the mobile version of a site, so the phone experience is what gets assessed. A site that is good on desktop and poor on a phone is being judged on the poor one.

Hidden content counts here too. Text tucked behind tabs and accordions that need a tap is weaker than text that is simply visible, because a crawler does not tap.

None of this makes a site rank on its own. It stops the phone version being the reason a site cannot rank, which is a different and more common problem.

Mobile design questions from Nixa owners