If you are creating a new website, these days the mobile experience can be a lot more important than the desktop experience.

This is because there are more users on mobile phones and tables than there are on desktops when it comes to browsing the internet.

As a result, the mobile user experience needs to be optimised as best as possible to keep your visitors happy and improve the results from your website.

Google has been doing mobile first indexing for a while now and this needs to be taken into consideration as well.

What is mobile-first indexing

Mobile first indexing is where Google mainly looks at the mobile version of your website when it sends its crawlers to index and rank your pages. 

Previously, Google would primarily use the desktop version of your website when deciding on the relevance of your pages and what to index for user searches. But, because most people are using mobile devices, they now focus on doing mobile-first indexing in order to ensure that users are getting the best possible content and user experience.

What does this mean for your website?

You need to consider the implications of having too many elements or elements that do not work well on screen such as pop-ups, images, and animations that hinder the experience on a smaller screen.

This means that you may need to hide some design elements and only show them on larger screen sizes.

There are other adjustments such as font sizes and completely different section designs that are optimised for smaller screens.

Do user-testing on mobile

The best way to develop and optimise a great mobile user experience for your website is to test with real users on multiple devices. This will give you valuable feedback that will translate to better performance in Google.

To learn more about mobile-first indexing you can see some best practices from Google here.