In 2023, it will be essential for websites to be fast and mobile-responsive, not only to engage users, but to secure a favourable search engine ranking. In the past year, we have seen stronger demand for convenience and instant access to information via mobile phones. An increasingly even split between desktop and mobile browsing means businesses need to look beyond only optimising their website for the computer screen. If webpages don’t fit the screen, the menu button is hard to find, or load times are too long, businesses may suffer a loss of sales, or even worse, a damaged brand reputation.
A mobile-responsive site resizes content to adapt to different devices, whether it be desktop, tablet or mobile. Images are also scaled to reduce lag time, fit the frame, and suit the resolution of the display. Through optimising with these features, your website can be listed higher on the search results with Google rewarding mobile-responsive sites and they can help lower your bounce rate (i.e., less people leaving your site). Users demand seamless experiences so mobile-responsive sites that enable a faster and more streamlined experience encourage consumers to stay on the site for longer.
The newly released WordPress 6.1 is already helping businesses with mobile-responsive sites via fluid typography. This new feature allows text to resize seamlessly based on the display size. Although businesses previously could manually enable fluid typography via a CSS code, this new update allows businesses to improve their site without coding. This is one of many ways WordPress is supporting mobile-responsive sites. However, it is still up to companies to invest in the themes, plug-ins and designs needed to continue to engage in this increasingly competitive space.
For small businesses, outsourcing website management to an agency can be invaluable. A trusted agency takes the guesswork out of building a website, ensuring your website employs the latest features applicable to your business, without hurting website performance.
attributed to Ricky Blacker, WordPress Evangelist, WP Engine