If you’re building an eCommerce store, it’s important to remember that a significant percentage of your customers won’t be shopping from a desktop PC or laptop, but via the mobile version of your site instead.
This means that you need to ensure your mobile site is as functional, fast, and easy to navigate as your desktop version – and this can be a tricky task for beginners. Luckily, Magento is renowned for providing a world-class mobile experience for eCommerce, so it shouldn’t be difficult to optimise your store for mobile users.
In this quick guide, we’re going to take a look at some of the ways you can enhance your Magento store for mobile users, from improving loading times to improving your on-site content.
Is a mobile site different from a desktop site?
Yes! Mobile sites need to be structured and organised to support the use of fingertips rather than a mouse or trackpad, and all text and images need to be resized to make for easier reading and viewing on a smaller screen.
And don’t forget the loading and memory capabilities of a mobile phone vs. a PC or laptop: even the most advanced smartphone can’t compete with the graphic and memory capacity of a desktop machine.
You also need to take into consideration that most mobile networks aren’t going to be as fast and responsive as stable WiFi accessed via a desktop. Many potential customers will browse their phones while travelling or commuting, meaning their internet connection and bandwidth capacity can fluctuate significantly within short periods of time.
For these reasons, it’s key to ensure that your Magento site is responsive and mobile-friendly for your customers who prefer to shop on the go.
How to make your website mobile-friendly
So, what can you do to make your site usable via a mobile device? Here are just some tweaks and tips you can use for a Magento website:
Improve speed and rendering time
Speed is going to be a key factor when it comes to your site’s mobile performance; if your loading times are too long, users are going to simply swipe off your site and head to another. To avoid this, there are a couple of things you can do:
– Reduce your page sizes. This will cut down on loading time and help your content load faster.
– Prioritise above-the-fold content. When navigating a website, ‘above the fold’ content refers to the image or text that is first visible when a visitor loads up your home page via a mobile device. To prevent slow loading times and a high bounce rate, create a manual CSS system, whereby your above-the-fold content is rendered in priority.
– Forget JSS bundling. On a performance level, most mobile devices will find it difficult to support large JSS bundles, which can reach up to 15 mb in size.
Optimise images
Images are going to be one of the biggest challenges for any mobile device, but there are a number of ways you can optimise them to make your mobile site more responsive:
– Compress all images. Compressing your images can allow you to save memory space without compromising on the quality of the image itself. This will help mobile sites run faster.
– Use JPEG, not PNG. PNG images – while pretty to look at on a desktop – will significantly slow down performance on any mobile device. Switch to JPEG where possible.
While this advice is relevant for mobile optimisation, it’s a good rule of thumb for any desktop website, too. You can seek out Magento SEO advice for more information on optimising images on your website.
Choose the right server
As anyone who uses Magento already knows, the platform can be incredibly greedy when it comes to resources and performance capacity. This is why it’s absolutely essential for you to host your Magento website using the right server. Don’t try to balance your budget or opt for the cheap option when it comes to your server: this is perhaps one of the most integral functions of your website.
For a Magento-friendly, mobile-friendly server, you should preferably aim for a VPS server or cloud server, at least 3GB of RAM, 25GB SSD capacity, and an individual database server.
Bottom Line
When building your Magento website, it’s important to consider those using mobile devices – especially as over 50% of web page visits come via mobile. By ensuring your site is mobile-friendly, you’ll provide a cross-platform experience and grow your organic traffic.
