By 2025, mobile eCommerce sales will account for 44% of all eCommerce retail sales. Mobile friendly eCommerce websites provide users with all the purchasing power all within a few clicks. If you own an eCommerce website, you need to make your website mobile responsive to boost sales. 

This is our guide for increasing eCommerce website mobile responsiveness, let’s go over all the important tips.

What is Mobile Web Design?

Smartphones are capable of far more than just texting and social media. Mobile devices are quickly becoming the primary method for brands to interact with customers. 

As an eCommerce store, having a strong online presence is crucial. Optimizing websites for search engines, adding high-quality videos and images, and building a brand identity.

However, most eCommerce store owners only focus on desktop optimization. Leaving mobile optimization out of the equation. To become a competitive player in the industry, you need to dominate mobile optimization. 

Above all, you need to make sure that your web design is “MOBILE RESPONSIVE,” which means it can adapt to different screen sizes. Regardless of the device an individual uses to open the website, the information should be presented clearly. 

Without mobile optimization, your catchy desktop designs will look distorted and boring on mobile. Some important pointers for mobile designs include:

• Mobile-First Design - As more and more customers browse and buy on their phones, making mobile-first design instead of desktop is becoming important. Designers have to focus on optimizing website content on mobile and then focus on desktop, instead of the other way around. 
• Responsive Design - The bigger the screen size, the more elements a user will be able to see. Make sure your website is able to adapt to all the different screen sizes. 
• Search Engine Friendly Designs - Having cool looking designs is good and all, but you also need to make sure your website is optimized for SEO.

Some Key Principles for Web Mobile Design

There are some basic steps you can follow to make your website more mobile friendly, such as:

• Use white space and simple designs to create information easier for readers.
• Make sure the text is readable, with good color contrast and larger buttons and touch target. 
• Limited form filling and user detail capturing. 
• Optimizing page speed.
• Make sure there’s visual and differences between desktop and mobile interfaces.
• Make sure users can switch between mobile and desktop sites to finish off purchases.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Mobile Responsive Sites

Advantages

• User experience friendly mobile responsiveness sites work seamlessly and effortlessly on whatever device a user is using.
• A responsive design helps you save money as you don’t have to design different layouts for desktop, iPads, laptops, and mobile. 
• Google appreciates responsive design and you can achieve higher rankings on SERPs.
• Your site has the single identity and pool of information across different devices. 

Disadvantages

• Responsiveness done poorly can hurt your website’s performance and lead to irritated customers and abandoning shopping carts. 
• Takes a lot of time. If you want to develop responsive designs, you need to spend a lot of time on it.
• Websites can become too long to scroll and users tend to get annoyed by it.
• A single site with a responsive design means you’re forced to create a high-quality UX on just one platform. 

How to Optimize Your eCommerce Website for Mobile?

If your eCommerce store isn’t mobile responsive, this is the right time to optimize it. For some businesses, it could include making minor changes to your website, for some it may mean an entire redesign.

Run a mobile-friendliness test to see how responsive your website currently is. Based on the results, make the decision to either re-design your website or to make minor changes.

#1. Focus on Responsive, Catchy Web Design

It’s easy to make an eCommerce website look great on desktop, but achieving the same level of aesthetics on mobile. 

You don’t want users to be welcomed with an off-putting design when they open your website on mobile. Most likely your design is getting cut off, or some images aren’t loading properly. To fix this, you need a mobile responsive design.

Fastor eCommerce launchpad provides you the perfect place to launch your eCommerce website. While taking care of all the important website optimization factors, especially mobile responsiveness.

#2. User-Friendly Navigation is Important

Making a mobile-friendly eCommerce website is more than just creating a pretty looking website. It should work seamlessly as well. If your navigation isn’t working perfectly, users will have no option but to leave the website. 

Mobile websites often have limited navigation options. As the screen size is limited, you cannot include all the links and pages on the menu.

At the very least, you need to make sure that the most important pages on your site are easy to find, click, and navigate. 

#3. Improve Website Loading Speed

According to a study, 1 out of every 4 users would leave a website if it takes more than 4 seconds to load a website. 

Having faster loading times will not only increase user experience, but also help in generating sales. On an average, your website should load in less than 3 seconds.

Every second makes a difference. Every time a second of loading time increases, the bounce rate increases dramatically.

You can make a huge difference in the website loading speed by optimizing images, reducing the amount of content on your site, using a cache plugin.

#4. Checkout Process Should be Seamless

The goal of an eCommerce store is to make sure the customers move through the sales funnel.

eCommerce websites have to do a lot of things that other websites do not. The website has to fulfill orders, process payments, and more. To make sure you achieve as much sales as possible, your process needs to be intuitive.

Mobile devices have much less screen size. This is why it's vital to place all the information correctly. If the page keeps reformatting or if it's too hard for users to fill the information, you just lost a sale. 

#5. Optimize Images and Videos

Optimizing images and videos on websites is absolutely crucial. Be it the desktop version or the mobile version. Images and videos are the heart and soul of an eCommerce website. If they are not optimized, they slow down your website significantly. 

Make sure the images are clear, and they are the right size according to your web design. It would be better if you hire a designer to create and size the images for you. 

eCommerce videos should be the right size to be fully viewed on mobile. None of the videos on your website should play before a user clicks on it. 

#6. No Pop Ups and Ads

Anything you design for mobile users, just keep one thing in mind that they have limited screen space. 

As a mobile user, you wouldn’t want to be bombarded with pop-ups and ads right? So why do that to your users?

Google strictly hurts the SEO results of the websites that have invasive pop-ups and screens full of ads. All of this leads to bad user experience and Google hates websites with poor UX.

Instead of using pop-ups for showing offers, start email marketing with your email list. 

#7. No Walls of Words

eCommerce should be all about showing, not telling. If you want, you can follow the golden rule of cinematography, show what you want, never use words to tell. 

Obviously, you need some content on your website for SEO. But that doesn’t mean you should add too much content to your website.

If the content is hard for mobile users to read and navigate through, it’s going to hurt the quality of your website. 

Open your website on the mobile and check if any of the content is getting cut off. To optimize text on your website, ask these questions:

• Is there too much text on the page?
• Is the space between text weird?
• Is there too much white space between the text?

#8. Avoid Scrolling Fatigue

As mobile users will be using their thumb to navigate the site, you shouldn’t make the website too long. Call to actions should appear at the bottom half of the screen.

Use other elements to provide vital information so users don’t have to scroll too much. 

#9. Make Your Products Appealing

Do you think your product pages are enticing enough that a user would purchase the product or add it to their cart?

You need to ask your friends and family to open pages on mobile and ask for their feedback. If they don’t like it, change the product pages according to the feedback. 

A good rule of thumb is to invest in great photos and videos of the product, 3D product demos, product enlargement and augmented reality.