Mobile-First Design & its Importance for Business

Mobile-first design is a design strategy that says when you create a website or app, you should start sketching and prototyping the smallest screen first and work your way up to larger screens. Its main aim is to provide the best user experience to people who visit the website on their cell phone. They are the first priority of web developers who focus on such a design. 

Google has made it clear that mobile-first is the way to go. Smartphone screens grow in their sizes, which meant that it is convenient for users to perform targeted actions through their devices. If you are still waiting to optimize your site for mobile viewing, you’re almost too late. Mobile-first web design is not just a trend, it’s the future of web design. By updating your website now, you will gain new customers, enjoy higher search ranking and have a website that looks beautiful wherever it is viewed.

By designing for mobile-first, you will end up with a final product that works beautifully on both desktop and mobile devices. Mobile-first web design also helps the business to focus on the basics instead of padding their content with extra details. Instead of trying to fill in endless white space, you will instead keep things simple and straightforward something that every customer will appreciate. 

With the increase in mobile website viewers, mobile web design provided an alternative to the main desktop viewing experience. Thus, responsive web design was designed as a solution to having to create multiple web designs – one for desktop, one for mobile, etc. The method of designing for mobile-first takes this one step further and is based on the idea that the optimal viewing experience should be on a mobile device vs a desktop device.

If you want your users to have the best possible experience on mobile and desktop devices, designing for mobile-first is the way to go. You won’t have to worry about there being mobile feature compulsions, or slow loading times when using a mobile device. Google shouldn’t castigate you either since your website will load fast from any viewing device.

Ever since Google shifted to mobile-first indexing, adopting a mobile-first design approach directly elevates your chances of getting high ranking on the search engine. In fact, a good SEO expert agency will always advise you to shift to a mobile-first approach from a mobile-responsive one. Some of the benefits you gain from applying mobile first-design to your website are:

• Even Google’s algorithm and criteria now give priority to mobile-first websites. So if you want your website to have a higher visibility and Google ranking, you should definitely switch to the mobile-first website.
• Nothing is more important for a website than to provide a better user experience to its visitors. That is exactly what provides an edge to a business over its competitors. Websites that fail to satisfy their visitors end up losing potential customers to their competitors.
• The mobile-first design website allows you to gain the maximum advantage of social media usage. Your business can use social media as a channel to divert traffic to its website. However, this will only be possible if you have a mobile-first design website taking into consideration as most of the people use social media apps on their phones.
• With mobile-first, you create your strong foundation. This foundation will help strengthen other designs for tablets and desktop. The foundation should always be content and mobile-first design emphasizes content over navigation.
• Mobile-first design forces you to really focus and maintain clarity by removing any unnecessary user interface decoration. By removing any distractions, you’ll invariably improve the user experience and that makes good business sense.

One of the best and quickest ways to build mobile-first pages is to use a responsive website creator that allows you to build unique designs code-free. The popularity of drag-and-drop page builders grows at a fast rate. There is no need to spend time at the learning curve in order to be able to create versatile web pages without tweaking the code.

Moreover, you can use ready-made web themes that include all essentials that are needed for a quick start of your web project. All you need to do is to select a web theme that suits your topic, adjust it with the help of the drag-and-drop admin panel, upload the pages with your content, and bring it online.

Neglecting mobile design in this day and age is a UX design iniquity as mobile phones have undoubtedly become the leader of gadgets. They can be found in almost everyone’s pockets and purses. You can find 5-year-old surfing on a mobile phone as well as a 50-year-old doing the same. Hence, by making your website mobile-friendly and opting for a mobile-first design, you can cater to any and every age group.