How To Build a Mobile-Friendly Website

In today’s technology-focused world, it’s crucial for businesses to have a mobile-friendly website. This is especially the case for online casino operators, whose customers like to play on the go. Online casinos are operating in an industry that is highly competitive and cutthroat. If customers can’t access your website from their mobile, or if they have a poor user experience, they’ll go somewhere else and you lose out. It’s as simple as that.

It’s not just about the customer experience, however. Search engines also crawl your website and if it doesn’t meet certain criteria, this can affect your visibility online and hugely affect the amount of traffic to your site. Learn how to build a successful website for mobile with this article.

Consider keywords

The way people search is now predominantly on mobile devices.

It’s important to realize that people search differently on desktops to how they do on mobile phones. That’s because they don’t use each device in the same way, which can influence the way they search. If you’re building a website for mobiles, you’ll need to optimize the site for mobile searches, rather than desktop ones. This involves working with an SEO agency, or brushing up on your own SEO copywriting skills, to optimize your content to make sure your business is ranking in the search results above your competitors.

Responsive design

Responsive design is crucial to ensuring your site performs well on both mobile and desktop devices.

Responsive design can solve a lot of problems because it means that the website adjusts automatically to the device on which the person is viewing it. This cuts out a lot of work because there’s no need to run and maintain two different websites, which is handy if you have don’t have many resources.

As many people choose to gamble as and when the feeling strikes them, it’s important they can access your site on whichever device they have to hand and have a great experience, be it on a desktop, mobile or tablet. A perfect example of a website that has built an amazing mobile casino user experience, for both Android and iOs users to run mobile apps as well as web apps, is the well-respected 888 online casino.

In terms of design, you should also look at aspects such as font size and legibility, website usability and how long it takes pages and images to load on a mobile device. If these hamper the user experience in some way, they can damage the visibility of a website in search results.

Beware of Google’s mobile index

Google’s mobile index gathers information from a site’s mobile version and uses this to inform the database.

For the last few years now, Google has been crawling pages and storing records of them in its mobile index. In cases where websites have a mobile version and a desktop version, the search engine has been gathering information from the mobile version of the website and organizing its database according to these.

This means it’s more than important than ever to have a mobile-friendly website because Google attaches priority to mobile. When users conduct searches, the search engine will display results based on how well the website functions on mobile devices.

Without a viewport meta tag on pages, the desktop version of the site will appear on the mobile device and can be difficult to navigate. The viewport tag allows the web designer to control the size of the part of the browser window in which the user can view web content. This makes web pages easier to navigate on mobile.

Add AMP code to your pages

Page speed can be a huge factor in securing customers as if your site doesn’t load quickly enough, your customers are going to go elsewhere.

Since page speed is a major factor in search engine visibility, you need to add AMP — accelerated mobile pages — code to your website pages. These are streamlined HTML copies of webpages and help websites to render them faster on mobile devices. The code strips out unnecessary CSS, JavaScript and HTML code to improve load times by as much as up to a second. Quick page speed is vital for an online casino as customers will go elsewhere if they can’t access the site as and when they need to.

Audit your site with Google Lighthouse

Use the Google Lighthouse extension for a thorough audit of your site.

Want to know how well your website is performing technically? You can do this with the Google Lighthouse extension on Chrome. The extension provides useful insight into how fast your page is loading, as well as other aspects of accessibility and performance. It can save you a lot of time because it runs several tests quickly and produces a report in seconds.

Consider android and iOS operating systems

Operating systems and apps can also have an impact on the success of your site.  

Think about operating systems and any apps you offer because this is another factor you can optimize in your mobile strategy. Apple devices only allow certain apps to be available on iOS, whereas android devices tend to allow many more. Search engines have started to return apps in results now. They’ll evaluate app titles, URLs and descriptions (on-page factors), and also backlinks (links from external sites to the app URL) and user reviews (off-page factors) to decide whether or not your app is featured in the search results.

Summary

As technology develops more and more, a business will encounter new challenges when it comes to developing their websites and adapting them to meet the demands of mobile devices. Online casinos are a fantastic example of an industry that has achieved this successfully and is reaping the benefits with so many customers accessing their sites on mobile.