Is Your Responsive Site Not Working Up to Expectations? Here’s Why?
You might have gone the whole hog to develop a responsive site, but have failed to give the end-user what he wants. Does it make sense to have a responsive site without quite making a positive impact on your conversion rates? In other words, what is the advantage of having a multi-platform website when its user experience isn’t consistently appeasing, across platforms. You need to find the reasons as early as possible, and in this blog, we help you have a look at some of the possible reasons.
Have a Re-look at Website Navigation
Your designers must have failed to come out of the more rigid desktop-like navigational experience. Not taking the mobile-first approach to the project must have led to this. Or maybe, in their zest to deliver a great mobile experience, they must have committed a few oversights, like breaking the navigation to the point of immobility, leading to user frustration.
The responsiveness of your site might be impacted by some of these factors:
- Too many layers of navigation
- Too much space for navigation
- Lack of clarity of options
- Lists instead of icons
- Left-aligned navigation menu
- Absence of a prominent search tool
- Absence of filters
- Long checkout process
The best way to overcome these problems is to:
- Limit the site to 3 levels of navigation
- Use nested navigation to save space
- Make options obvious and clear
- Replace lists with icons
- Place the navigation menu at the top
- Use filters to make product search fast
- Nail one-click checkout
- Make and position a prominent search box
Overlooking the Touch-Screen Experience
Your users are deprived of a fluid user experience, because your developers must have overlooked the importance of touchscreen experience. If your user should zoom in to tap buttons or other navigation-based elements, then you are simply driving your users away. To correct this, you may have to bring about the following changes to your site:
- Use amply sized and spaced contact points
- Place them strategically
- Eliminate visual distractions
- Eliminate rollovers all together
- Ensure navigation is always accessible
- Provide ample swipe space
Using Separate Mobile-Specific URLs
A possible reason for poor performance of your site is using separate URLs for mobile versions of the website. The main feature of responsive web design is to have one and only one website on one domain. By using sub domains in a website’s URL structure, you end up competing against yourself and may get pulled up for copied content. Imagine how confusing it would be for users to bookmark pages of your site, or be moved to a new domain every time they wish to view it on another device.
Ill-Optimized Images
If your site is loading slow there might be a host of reasons for it one of which might be improperly optimized images. Your developers might have thought that it’s the job of the mobile service provider to compress it, without knowing that it’s not always the case. Whatever might be the reason, it’s reason good enough to upset your viewers to the point of abandoning your site.
The best remedial action you can take is to leverage services such as Adaptive Images. It is a PHP script which automatically identifies the screen size and resizes the image to match the devise. It also gives you the option of customizing it to set the quality of images and browser caching.
A Blind Eye to Compression
If your developers have not compressed your resources by using gzip then you are increasing the number of bytes a page is sending across the network. This will make it impossible for your users to navigate your website with faster loading pages. The solution therefore lies in enabling compression to reduce file sizes and increase download speed.
Retaining Unnecessary Page Elements
It’s important to get an understanding of how the different page elements of your site are used by users. In case they are least used removing them can help you improve the performance of your page. For instance, having social media buttons for nearly 20 requests can take 246.7k in bandwidth. So, if social sharing is not the main traffic source of a responsive page, doing away with them can do you a favor.
If you take a closer look at the above causes you might be in a better position to optimize your site for optimum performance. If there’s more to it, then get in touch with our experts for the best possible web design solution. Our wide experience in designing responsive websites will help you empower your website with the elements that work together to deliver optimum results.