Is your website optimized for mobile? If the answer is no, you’re in for a rude awakening. It bears a lot more importance than some online businesses think, so if you haven’t taken the steps to make your website and its content more mobile-friendly, you’re missing out on sales, new customers, and pushing visitors down the conversion funnel.

Research by Quartz found that users now spend nearly 80 percent of their time browsing the web via mobile devices. Imagine someone in your target audience stumbling upon your website through their phone only to have a negative user experience. The chances of them revisiting on desktop are slim to none, which is just one of many reasons you should optimize your site for mobile users.

Why should you optimize for mobile?

Around 51 percent of consumers have completed a purchase using a smartphone. It’s quickly become the most widely-used method of purchasing products and creating transactions as more and more people browse the web on the go and choose to use non-desktop devices.

Optimizing your website for mobile is one of the best things you can do for your online business because it’s what a majority of people use to stay connected. Your site’s mobile SEO matters and greatly affects how you rank in search engines so you can increase your organic traffic and see a boost in sales.

Let’s look at three ways you can boost mobile conversions on your website so your business succeeds.

1. Use mobile-specific popup templates

Adding optins to your campaigns and website makes all the difference in how it performs, the state of your conversions, and your sales. If you aren’t urging visitors to take action or sign up for your email list while they browse your site, you’re missing out on new subscribers and possibly new paying customers.

Not everyone who visits your website will give you a way to contact them once they leave. If you make it easy for visitors to hand over their information, then it’s also easier to build a healthy email list of potential customers.

Your email list creates a direct connection between your brand and its target market, and if your audience isn’t on that list, it’s increasingly difficult to give them the content they want. Mobile-specific popups cater specifically to mobile users and encourage them to receive your content.

2. Create easy navigation

Take a good look at your website right now. If you were a unique visitor, how easy would it be for you to find different webpages and browse it without difficulty? Too often, website owners don’t take into account that people want a seamless UX that makes it easy for them to get from point A to point B. So, if your site has navigation that’s unclear, difficult to find, or doesn’t take them where they’re trying to go, you can bet you’re losing out on potential customers.

Create a menu that makes it easy to navigate your website on mobile. Add popular, widely-used links to the menu bar so you can direct traffic where you want it to go. Lead users to CTAs using text, arrows, and easy-to-understand symbols that will boost your conversions or allow you to easily capture email addresses. It’s always wise to add a search bar where it’s clear to see so that, in cases where users can’t find what they’re looking for, searching for it can take them where they want to go.

3. Increase site speed

Does your website take ages to load? If so, it’s past time that you do something about it. Google found that 53 percent of users will abandon a page if it takes three seconds or longer to load. Imagine missing out on more than half of your potential conversions and how that can harm the growth and success of your business. This is easily preventable if you take measures to increase your site speed.

Use a website speed tool to determine how fast or slow your site loads. From there, you can take steps to ensure your site is up to speed—literally. Optimize your images so they’re compressed into smaller files. Enable browser caching so that your browser can load your web pages without having to send another HTTP request to the server. Use a content delivery network, or CDN, to cache your site on a network of local servers instead of just one.

Wrapping up

If you have yet to make your website mobile-friendly, these tips will help you get started. You don’t want to increase your bounce rate and miss out on potential conversions because the mobile version of your site isn’t built for non-desktop users. Instead, you can ensure that you’re doing everything you can to boost business by creating a website built for everyone. How will you optimize for mobile?