Are you struggling to improve conversion on your website? Are visitors coming to your website but quickly leaving again? It could be that your website isn’t fully optimised for your mobile users.
Most of the time, websites are built on computers with large monitors to provide the best view, so it’s easy to forget that many visitors will be using a mobile instead of a desktop.
Not only does this mean that they’re viewing the site on a much smaller screen, but the way the website loads and how users can interact with it differs.
Considering that there are now approximately 7.1 billion smartphones worldwide (August, 2024) and 60.67% of internet traffic is mobile, making sure your website is mobile-friendly has never been more important. These numbers are climbing each year.
We’re going to dive into mobile optimisation and highlight the issues you should avoid if you want your website to perform well and provide your customers with a good user experience, resulting in a higher ranking on Google.
Why is mobile optimisation important?
If you check your website’s analytics, you’ll probably notice that most of your traffic comes from mobile devices. However, even if the majority is from desktop, there are still two significant reasons why you should ensure your website is mobile-friendly.
1. User satisfaction
A non-optimised site can cause many problems. It may become difficult to navigate and read, pages might load slowly, and overall, it can result in a very disappointing user experience. All your hard work in building a great-looking website could be wasted.
Poor optimisation can also lead to subpar performance on your website. When users cannot find exactly what they’re looking for or struggle to read the content, they are likely to leave.
As a result, you may notice your mobile bounce rate (the percentage of users who leave a site after viewing only one page) increase and your conversions (when users perform a desired action) decrease.
It’s worth noting that 50% of online purchases are made via mobile device. Although this may not be as relevant to the Medical Device industry, it demonstrates how customers have become accustomed to doing everything via their phone that they can do on a desktop.
If your website is not performing well for you by bringing in new customers, it can’t help you achieve your business goals, hence why taking the time to optimise it is so important.
2. Search engine ranking
Search engines aim to provide the best, most relevant results for users, which means websites are ranked based on the quality of their user experience. They use many different factors to determine this.
One factor that has gained traction in recent years is mobile optimisation. As more people use their smartphones to search the internet, search engines need to ensure that websites are built to be mobile-friendly.
If a website has a significantly higher bounce rate on mobile devices compared to desktops, it indicates that there might be a problem with how the website is displayed on mobiles. Consequently, search engines will not rank these websites as highly because they don’t provide as good a user experience.
Why is this important? Well, ranking higher will likely lead to more traffic on your website, as people tend to trust search engines to display the best results and are therefore more likely to select the highest-ranking options.
If you would like to learn more about how search engines rank websites, see our medical device SEO guide.
Want to make sure that your website looks it's best on every device?
How to optimise your website for mobile traffic?
There are quite a few things to consider when optimising for mobile because mobiles load web pages differently from desktops.
As a result, some features available on desktops aren’t available on mobile phones. Additionally, due to the smaller screen size, the layout of a web page on a mobile can often look very different from how it appears on a desktop monitor.
We’ve covered some of the key considerations when optimising your website for mobile use. 
Optimise for fingers
It might sound obvious, but mobile users will be navigating with their fingers instead of a mouse or trackpad. This means that when a user is trying to click something on a page, the surface area that they end up clicking is much larger than with a mouse, meaning it’s less accurate.
This can make clicking links and buttons difficult if they’re not formatted correctly. You’ll need to ensure that links are spaced apart, so that people don’t accidentally end up clicking on more than one link at once. It should be easy for them to click the exact link they want. Furthermore, you need to ensure buttons are spaced apart and big enough to read and click on.
This is worth keeping in mind even when designing for desktop use as well, some users can still use a touchscreen to navigate a page. If a user cannot navigate properly, they’ll probably end up leaving your site and you might lose potential customers
Optimise your images
When building your website, you should try to include eye-catching images that break up the text, but problems can occur when images are made smaller to fit on a phone screen.
If the image is not high quality or closely cropped, the user may not be able to make out what is in the image, which can appear quite unprofessional. You need to make sure that you only use images where the quality won’t be affected when shrunk down.
Don’t use long paragraphs
Correctly formatting text can greatly improve user experience on your website by making large bodies of text, such as blog articles, much easier to follow. This is especially important for mobile users.
Long paragraphs of text are not ideal for mobile users, as they can take up the entire screen. Users may not realise there are other elements on the page and may navigate away because they don’t want to read a large amount of text. Additionally, users won’t appreciate having to scroll through long blocks of text to reach the end of the page.
Keep paragraphs short and easy to read. Use images and line breaks to break up the text, making it more visually appealing and less overwhelming for users.
It’s also important to include calls-to-action in your text that are as noticeable on mobile as they are on desktop, to encourage users to move through your site.
Avoid using flash
With the official end of support for Adobe Flash Player in 2020, Flash is no longer supported by any major web browsers, making it obsolete for modern websites. Flash content is now inaccessible on mobile devices and most desktops, presenting significant usability and security issues.
Websites still relying on Flash should transition to more modern technologies or remove Flash features altogether to ensure full compatibility and a seamless user experience across all devices