If your website isn’t optimized for an immersive mobile phone experience in 2025, you’re missing out on some serious traffic – and probably customers. Since 2020, 84% of the Canadian population has used a smartphone, including over half of all senior citizens, a number that is increasing every year as landline use continues to dwindle.
On top of that, 95.2% of our population is using the internet, making Canada one of the most connected countries on the planet behind only South Korea, Sweden, and the Netherlands.
People across the country, young and old, are using their smartphones to shop, search, and find businesses online – and there’s no sign of slowing down.
In this article, we’re sharing strategies to ensure your website is just as functional and easy to use on mobile as it is on a computer; it’s all about screen size. But first, why do some websites perform so poorly on small screens, and what’s the benefit of optimizing for mobile?
Expectations vs. Reality
In a nutshell, page speed is the amount of time it takes a browser like Chrome or Firefox to secure a connection to a web page, receive the content, and display it on your screen. This is calculated from the time someone taps a link to your site and the time the website has loaded enough to allow ‘interaction’. The average website takes 15 seconds to load on common cell phones, which is a lifetime in the digital world, and impatient would-be visitors will bounce from your site long before that. In fact, when a website takes longer than 3 seconds to load, more than half of the potential visitors high-tail it out of there.
Page load time is a major part of the problem, but it’s not everything. There are a number of factors that could contribute to a poor visitor experience and cause them to give up on your site. Annoying pop-ups, unclickable elements, navigation challenges, and content that doesn’t fit the screen can all contribute to an awful experience.
Please Use the App Instead!
There are some websites on the internet known for providing a particularly poor user experience on mobile. Some theorize that this is a strategy to entice users to download and use their app in order to avoid fighting with their website. You’ve probably experienced this before – when a website throws popups in your face asking that you download their app. News websites are notorious for using this strategy, as is Facebook. It’s a devious way to force you to download apps that allow for a large amount of private data to be funnelled into the app. Don’t do it!
In a situation like this, the app usually hosts a more functional and enjoyable experience than the website. But this is not a viable strategy for small to medium-sized businesses. As a rule of thumb, a website optimized for all screen sizes should always be the goal. Or else…
Why Mobile Optimization is Important
The importance of having an optimized site for mobile screens cannot be stressed enough. Most importantly, faster loading sites are more likely to “convert”. To convert means to take an action like submitting a form, purchasing a product, or initiating a phone call. Fast sites convert more, and the difference is measurable. Conversion rates can drop dramatically by up to 20% for every second delay in mobile page load time.
Mobile websites that load faster also tend to rank higher in search engines like Google. With the increase in mobile internet users, mobile optimization is now a major factor in search engine optimization (SEO). Google uses mobile-first indexing, which means that the speed and experience of your website as seen by small screens, detected by Google’s search robots, is more important than how your website responds on a desktop. Optimize for speed and experience for small screens and rank better in Google. It’s as simple as that!
So, ignore how your site performs on small screens at your own peril. Most business owners rarely ever look at their own websites on their phones. If you can’t remember when you did, do it now! And, if you believe that your website is rainbows and unicorns on a small screen, ask a friend or family member to have a look and give you ‘honest’ feedback. Listen hard.
Optimizing for Mobile
There are many things you can do to improve the usability and performance of a mobile website, most of which you’ll need an experienced website developer for. Here’s a breakdown of some of the most important tactics to consider:
Responsive Design
If you ever find yourself on a mobile website where the content doesn’t seem to fit the screen, this is probably due to a lack of responsive design. Responsive design, or responsiveness, refers to a website’s ability to adapt its layout and content to fit different screen sizes. A website developer will employ the use of flexible grids, fluid images, alternative font sizes, media queries, and more to ensure the website itself changes along with the screen size.
Lazy-Load
Lazy loading is a web development method that sets priority levels for different content when it comes to loading a page. Certain images, videos and JavaScript don’t need to be loaded (downloaded to your device) right away – especially if these resources are below the first screen or two of the webpage when scrolling. Lazy loading allows the website to load faster by prioritizing the content that is currently visible before beginning to load everything else. This will give the user the appearance that the page is fully loaded, as they browse the content at the top of the page while the remainder of the page takes its time to load (deferred). This creates a better user experience and reduces the initial load time.
Large Images
Large images have the ability to really slow down a website, regardless of device. If an image is too large, it consumes more bandwidth and takes longer to load. This creates a poor user experience while hurting SEO.
A good target for image size is between 100kb – 200kb while preserving some clarity and the volume of other assets on the page. For a page with plenty of media, you’ll want to lean towards the smaller sizes, while a page with just one image is less of a concern. 200KB is a good aiming point. Anything over 500KB should definitely be optimized and replaced, while anything over 1MB has the ability to really impact the page load speed.
TIP: When uploading an image to your blog or website, consider the ‘container size’. This is how large the image needs to be to correctly fit the width of the content on a desktop computer. Resize your image to the maximum width, which could be 800px to 1000px, but all websites are different. We see site owners uploading 4,000px-wide images to a page that only needs a 600px-wide image.
Content Optimization
The content itself is another factor. Simply copying over the content on your desktop website to a mobile device won’t always translate well. Computers and larger devices are better for browsing large content and for reading more in-depth text sections. But that isn’t the case for mobile.
On a mobile phone, a single large paragraph has the ability to take up the entire screen. This creates a very poor user experience. Content on a mobile site should be easy to digest, with shorter text content, and elements to break up the page like bullet points, images, icons, and other graphic elements. When it comes to mobile, you need to completely rethink your content strategy.
Unnecessary Baggage
Every line of code you add to your website has the ability to slow down page load speeds and create a worse user experience. That’s why it’s important to carefully consider what’s truly necessary and what’s extra baggage slowing you down.
Excess JavaScript and CSS, apps you don’t use, and inactive plug-ins are all examples of unnecessary baggage that should be dropped or at least minified. However, before you take matters into your own hands and do something drastic, always consult with your web developer.
Caorda is a full-service web company, which means we can handle everything from website maintenance and custom app development to digital marketing, SEO, video, and graphic design. Our developers are especially skilled at creating fast-loading websites that perform on any device. To evaluate the user experience and performance of your website, contact us today about an audit.