7 Steps to a Mobile-Friendly Site

It’s crucial that your practice has a website, but to make sure you are optimizing your healthcare marketing potential, you also have to ensure that your site is mobile-friendly. Google factors in mobile friendliness into its site ranking, and 80% of Internet users own a smartphone. If your site doesn’t show up high on search engine results pages, or if patients can’t find what they’re looking for when they pull up your website on their smartphones (or other mobile devices like an iPad or Kindle Fire), they’ll lose interest in your practice.

Here are the seven things you need to do to make sure your website is mobile-friendly.

Ditch Flash. Good news: You don’t have to be a techie to understand this one! Most mobile devices do not support Flash, so don’t use it. Google will deem your site unfriendly for mobile if your site does.

Make sure your viewport accommodates various sizes. A viewport is a meta tag at the header of a page which tells browsers how to display the site’s content. If you do not have a viewport meta tag, mobile browsers will default to desktop dimensions, which is cumbersome on mobile devices. You also shouldn’t specify dimensions in the viewport information, but leave it as width=device-width to accommodate different screen sizes. If this is Greek to you, Google has a step-by-step tutorial here.

Be size-wise. For fonts, buttons and images, make sure they are all big enough to accommodate mobile screens. For fonts, 16 pixels is the recommended minimum. With buttons, keep in mind fingers on touch screens need a larger target than someone working through a mouse at a desktop would. Make sure the buttons are spaced far enough apart that mobile users don’t accidentally hit a different button. For images, use high-resolution photos that can withstand the scrutiny of high-definition screens and the ability to zoom in.

Listen to Google. Google has a list of factors it considers part of mobile-friendliness. Get familiar with them so you understand how your site’s usability stacks up and what the problem areas may be. You can peruse the “Mobile Usability” section of their Search Console guide here. Google also provides a free Mobile-Friendly Test tool.

Use YouTube for videos. To make sure your videos display properly on devices of all sizes, upload your healthcare site’s videos using YouTube. YouTube’s code is responsive already, meaning it will show up in the right proportions based on a device’s screen size.

Testing 1, 2, 3. Test your site on multiple mobile devices to spot any trouble spots. Try each button, video, link and filling out any forms on your site on each device.

Bring in Professionals. If you’re up to your eyeballs in the daily business of your practice, you may be saying, “I just don’t have time to get my head around all this.” Practice Builders is here for you with a Mobile Website Design service. Get on your way to a mobile-friendly site for your healthcare practice today by signing up for a free consultation or by emailing info@practicebuilders.com.