The amount of time and money people are spending on mobile devices is growing rapidly. Unfortunately many businesses still don’t have a mobile-friendly website, which frustrates their web visitors with tricky navigation and slow loading times. Studies show that 57% of mobile users will leave your website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load and another 30% will discard a transaction if the shopping cart isn’t friendly to their mobile device.
Pitfall #1: Bad Redirects
A website should be able to properly detect user agents and direct the web visitor to the desired page. In order for the server to properly direct visitors coming from a variety of mobile devices, the mobile site must have matching equivalent pages for every page that is existing on the website’s desktop version. This issue is an instigator for Google’s new handling of search results that redirect users to the home page.
Pitfall #2: Assuming all mobile devices are the same
This is a critical mistake that many people make especially when it comes to the designing of cross-platform web applications. It is really important to know that the users of an iPhone will expect a different user experience than the users of an Android phone. A good example of this is navigation backward through an application flow. Android users either have a physical back button or an on screen equivalent visible in every app, Windows Phone also has back buttons, but IOS users expect apps to include the back buttons.
Pitfall #3: Cloaking Content
This is a very common issue among mobile website as well as sites using technologies the search engines have difficulty crawling – Flash and JavaScript. It should be reminded that cloaking is violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and refers to the practice of presenting content to the search engine bots that is different from that presented to the web visitors. The best way to fix this issue is by ensuring that all user-agents and search engine bots are getting the same source code as mobile users.
Pitfall #4: Slow Page Load Time
This issue only gets worse when a site has redirects, which are unique requests and cause 0.5 seconds of latency each. Google is aware of this and will often send users directly to the end state URL from their results page. If multiple redirects exist on your site, though, it could cause your poor mobile user engagement.
About iRISEmedia:
iRISEmedia.com is a web design, social media marketing, and search engine marketing (SEM) firm in Toronto, Canada. Our team helps clients increase their reach and profitability by developing and implementing customized and targeted online and social media marketing strategies. We service clients in Toronto, Ontario, the GTA and throughout Canada as well as globally.
