Mobile mastery: optimising for on-the-go shoppers

1. Optimise your page loading speed

Customers often expect website pages to load in just a few seconds, and even faster for mobile pages. Compressing media files, reducing the number of videos and images, or opting for pre-loading or lazy loading will help to speed up your website for mobile users. Faster page loading times can reduce your bounce rate and can connect your customers to your products sooner

2. Resize images and icons

To allow your website visitors to easily view your mobile site content, resize images and icons so they are still easily clickable on a touchscreen, but don’t take up valuable space. Reducing image and video size can also help to improve your page loading speed. 

3.Optimise checkout for mobile users

The checkout process on mobile devices needs to be simple and easy to navigate. Many mobile shoppers are often looking to complete a sale faster than desktop users, as they may be shopping on the go or multitasking. Including payment options that give customers instant access to their payment information can also help to speed up the mobile payment process.

To achieve this, your checkout process could offer payment via digital wallets such as PayPal, Google Pay and Apple Pay, or auto-save for card details for faster future checkouts. Additionally, consider using methods such as autofill for address fields or copying shipping addresses into billing address boxes to make form-filling easier on mobile. 

Set up your ecommerce solution to accept recurring payments and offer repeat customers a speedy checkout. You can also set up payment schedules, create ongoing subscriptions and offer promotional plans to reward customer loyalty. 

Offering the option to checkout as a guest can also allow for faster checkout and prevent mobile users from having to fill in lengthy forms on smaller screens. Although many mobile checkout optimisation principles are like desktop checkout optimisation, ensuring your website is tailored to mobile purchases can help to improve your conversions and sales revenue.

4. Simplify navigation

Touchscreens are much less accurate than a mouse or trackpad and your website navigation needs to accommodate for this. Compress navigation bars into ‘hamburger bars’, which allows visitors to expand the site navigation menu on when they wish to view other pages. This can save valuable space on your mobile site for more product information.

5. Make all your content available to all your users

Although images and icons may have to be smaller and some text rearranged for easier mobile navigation, this does not mean that you need to sacrifice any of your website content. Giving your mobile users access to all the same content and information available on your desktop site can ensure mobile visitors don’t become frustrated and leave your site, costing you potential sales.

6. Test your website

Before you make your newly optimised mobile website live, run it through a mobile testing tool so you can identify and correct any problems that could affect your mobile user experience.