Most internet users today use mobile phones to surf the internet, and that trend is highly likely to continue. User preferences shifting toward mobile devices made it essential for any website that aspires to attract users to be mobile-friendly.
This trend is also evident in online shopping. According to Statista, 63% of online orders were made using smartphones in the first quarter of 2023. Since most customers will likely purchase from their mobile devices, eCommerce businesses should design stores that scale for different display sizes.
Mobile responsive or mobile-first design is the most popular approach to achieving seamless website scalability.
In this article, we will outline how mobile responsive design influences the conversion rates of eCommerce websites and ways you can apply mobile responsive design to promote conversion.
What Is Mobile Responsive Design?
Mobile first, or mobile responsive design, is a design paradigm according to which websites should be designed for mobile phones first and then adapted for desktops. This approach aims to provide a single website that will function optimally on desktop and mobile devices, leading to a better user experience.
Contrary to adaptive design, a paradigm that includes creating different versions for various screen sizes, mobile responsive design is focused on developing a single website layout that will scale to all screen sizes.
How does mobile responsive design increase conversion rates?
Mobile responsive design and its emphasis on user experience are especially beneficial for eCommerce businesses as they lead to higher conversion rates.
Mobile responsive design leads to increased conversion in the following ways:
Impact on search engine ranking (SEO)
Mobile responsive design is vital to your store’s search engine visibility. Utilizing mobile responsive design will positively affect your search engine ranking, enabling more potential customers to find you.
Since 2020, Google has used mobile-first indexing. Mobile-first indexing means that Google will use the mobile version of your website for ranking and indexing. If you didn’t optimize your store for mobile phones, it may not be properly indexed and ranked on Google, resulting in lower visibility.
Improved user experience
Mobile responsive design significantly affects user experience. If a web store is not optimized for mobile phones, users might find it challenging to navigate and experience problems such as unreadable fonts, distorted images, and slow-loading pages.
On the other hand, if a web store is easy to navigate through the touch screen, visitors will be more likely to become customers.
Better loading times
Websites’ general performance and loading times are some of the main factors influencing conversion rates. For example, if a page loads only 0.1 seconds faster, the conversion rate increases by 8.4%.
Besides increasing conversion, user experience and loading times influence your website’s SEO ranking, as search engines use mobile-friendliness and loading times as ranking factors.
Branding
Finally, mobile responsive design can affect business branding. An optimally designed mobile experience will convey trustworthiness, promote conversions, and encourage customers to return to an easy-to-use, well-designed store.
On the other hand, difficult-to-use websites and scaling problems may negatively impact business image. An unoptimized site is unlikely to promote conversion and mouth-to-mouth marketing. It can turn away potential customers and negatively impact your brand image.
How to make an eCommerce website mobile-friendly?
When designing and developing an eCommerce to make it mobile-friendly, focus on the following aspects:
Rely on responsive design principles
Create a web store that scales well regardless of the display size and shape. Your store should be accessible from smartphones, tablets, and desktops.
Responsive design principles are primarily implemented through HTML and CSS layouts to avoid bloating your website’s code. To make your store’s interface scale across different devices, rely on CSS flexbox and grid layouts and use the viewport meta tag in your HTML code.
Make it touchscreen-friendly
Your potential customers need to be able to navigate through your store using only one finger. That means your website’s fonts, buttons, and other interface elements should be readable without zooming in.
Improve loading times
As slow-loading pages are the main contributing factor to high bounce rates, you should prioritize optimizing your store for high performance.
To ensure fast loading times:
- Compress images. Compress and optimize images to increase your web store performance, as large photos increase page loading times.
- Avoid redirects. Unnecessary redirects to other pages decrease performance, and you should avoid them when possible.
When creating an eCommerce website, you should keep the size of the mobile screen in mind. Compared to desktops, mobile phones and tablets have much less space to include categories, promotions, and other sections.
We advise including a single menu icon that opens the drop-down menu. Ensure size and positioning consistency across your pages for an intuitive user experience when including the menu button.
Optimize content for the small screens.
Optimize your site’s content for small screens. Ensure you use clear and concise text, and avoid using small fonts and images that are difficult to see when accessing your store from mobile devices.
As HTML5 sites allow automatically scaling site content for smaller screens, use a viewport meta tag to scale your content according to the display size.
Mobile-friendly call-to-action buttons and checkout process
To promote conversion, you should ensure:
- you position your CTA (call-to-action) buttons (“Add to Cart” and similar) correctly,
- it is easily clickable and
- that your checkout process is convenient for mobile users.
When designing the checkout process, remember that checkouts are far more inconvenient when done from mobile devices. Simplify the method by avoiding all unnecessary fields and adding an auto-fill option.
Conclusion
Mobile-first design plays a vital role in increasing conversion. It does so through various factors, including search engine ranking, improving loading times, and providing optimal user experience. While SEO ranking brings potential customers to a store, fast loading times and optimal user experience directly increase customers’ likelihood of purchasing.
In 2023, 63% of online purchases were made using mobile devices. This trend is predicted to continue, with more and more buyers relying on mobile phones for online shopping.
Therefore, if you own an online store or plan to create one, you should design it with mobile devices in mind. Additionally, investing in professional eCommerce development services is an excellent way to ensure that your website scales well and promotes conversion in the long term.
