Adapt Your Website to Mobile Devices

The following solutions exist if your website is not currently mobile-friendly and you intend to upgrade it. You can determine how to update your pages to allow for better mobile and tablet display and improve your SEO and search ranking with these tools and useful resources. The following methods are applicable regardless of whether your present website uses HTML 4.01 or older code or if it has a static design that does not adapt to the screen resolution of mobile devices.

You may modify your present webpages and CSS files by including Media Queries CSS code to make them more responsive to diverse device viewscreens. Responsive web design (RWD) is currently in vogue, but changing a static or non-responsive site to be responsive can be a major task and is only advised for people with extensive experience altering the HTML and CSS files. In most circumstances, there will be a significant quantity of new information to learn, and the updating process may take some time.

Add a Separate Mobile Area as Option #2

On your current website, you can add a separate mobile-only website. The mobile version, or sub-site, can be placed in its folder or use a new domain with this option. Your mobile site will be visible inside the folder to search engines like Google, showing them higher for smartphone queries. The fact that the website is in a folder won’t hurt its rating. An automatic redirection script is an option.

Build a New Responsive Website as Option #3

Moving the material from your previous website into a new web template design can better use your time. Although they can be used on bigger sites, responsive designs perform best for smaller websites. Pages on this site are SEO- and mobile-friendly, and the text and image content will automatically resize to accommodate all screen sizes, including those of desktop, tablet, and smartphone devices. The design’s CSS Media Queries code determines the viewscreen resolution to enable responsiveness.

Build a New Website With a Sub-Site, Option #4

The greatest choice for modernizing an outdated website might be to create a brand-new design. You can more precisely target mobile consumers by creating a new site with a separate mobile version. The code on each page is more straightforward than in a responsive design, even though more web pages must be maintained. With faster page load times and a reduced version of your top-level or “complete” website just for mobile, this structure will typically provide more thorough SEO, higher page ranking, and a better user experience.

Responsive Design: What Is It? Return to Top

Using Media Queries CSS code, responsive design is a technique for creating web pages that can “flex” or adapt to all platforms, including desktop, tablet, and smartphone screens. The website will extend to occupy the entire display screen width whether visited on a desktop, laptop, or tablet computer. The width of websites will be reduced on smartphones and other small mobile devices to fit the screen resolution. On mobile devices, this will usually result in very long web pages, so in many circumstances, elements or sections of text can be hidden to present a more condensed version of the web pages. To improve the viewing experience and speed up page loading, photos are also set up to resize, and other non-mobile-friendly features may be hidden.

How do media queries work? Return to Top

CSS coding is used for fonts, colors, and other webpage styles on all current websites. The Media Queries CSS code determines the screen resolution of the device used to view a webpage. The types of the website can then be changed dynamically for improved presentation on the viewing device. It can change text sizes, picture sizes, and layout elements, and it can be used to hide items that are preferred for desktop website browsing but may not work on smartphones.

Older websites can employ media queries to identify screen resolution, device orientation, print, projection, and other things. Using this tool, you may specify a screen resolution “breakpoint” of 320 or 480 pixels and configure your webpages to display one font size for desktops and one for smartphones. Images may be stretched to fill the entire width of the browser, items can be hidden or relocated, and you can even have smartphones display different colors for the backgrounds and text. For additional information, see what responsive templates are.

Adapting Images Return to Top

Large images should be made flexible so they may expand and shrink to various screen resolutions on all devices, smartphones, tablets, and desktops, to enable viewing a website without side scrolling on numerous devices. To define images with a 100% width, CSS code is used. Media Queries are an additional tool that may control how images resize and enlarge at set intervals. See visual guidance in support.

Additional Mobile-Friendly Updates Return to the Top

It would help if you thought about having fewer photos on each page, smaller images, and hiding any parts that are not mobile-friendly, in addition to having a website that dynamically changes fonts, layout, and image sizes using Media Queries CSS. In addition to allowing for a better user experience, page load speed affects search engine ranking. Once more, the Media Queries code can be used to make all of these changes.

Tap targets are any small website element that links to another page or website, such as menu buttons, form submits buttons, and corresponding icons. Make these items large enough to pass the Google Pagespeed Insights Test for the best SEO. This is a helpful website checking tool that Google provides online, and it highlights issues with your website that you need to address to pass the Google Mobile-Friendly Test and improve its position in mobile searches. While you should aim to make your site mobile-friendly, it may still do well in desktop searches even if it fails this test.

Mobile Meta Tags: After setting up your websites to be responsive, you can add a “viewport” meta tag to ensure they perfectly fit different viewing screens. If your HTML pages cannot respond to requests with a width of fewer than 320 pixels, then this meta tag should not be added. The smallest smartphone resolution is 320. For additional information, see upgrading your website for mobile support.