What changes need to be done on a website before launching a mobile app? Your target audience has gone mobile. They prefer using mobile devices such as smartphones to access your website. A recent study showed that on average, mobile users spend 12% of their time browsing the internet on mobile devices. Quick arithmetic shows that this is roughly 87 hours a month and 1,044 hours annually spent on their smartphone or any other internet-enabled mobile device.
Based on the fact that 90% of your potential customers’ time is spent on mobile apps, it is imperative to create one for your Singapore business. Globally, 67% of small businesses have invested in one or more mobile applications. Most of them know what they are doing and profit from the mobile applications, but in most cases, the apps are awful extensions of the existing poorly designed website.
While you might be tempted to go straight into developing your mobile application and tossing it into the market, it is a huge mistake that can cost your thousands of dollars in revenue. Your mobile app should be a gateway to your Singapore business website. Therefore, implementing it without making sure that your website is optimised correctly and designed will spell doom on your brand.
Here are critical website fixes that you need to make before launching your business mobile app in Singapore.
Fix 1: Reduce Sliders and Banners
For the last couple of months, sliders have become very popular, and most websites have 5-6 high-quality images to a slider in a bid to communicate with the target audience. New studies show that sliders are not ideal for business websites as they reduce visibility on mobile and compromise user experience.
The same case applies to banner especially if they contain embedded text within an image. The wisest thing to do if you have banners with text on your website is rendering the text with CSS and HTML instead of embedding it into an image. This fix will make it more visible and flexible when viewed on a smaller screen.
Fix 2: Work on Content Design
Well, structuring or designing your website content around mobile can be an uphill task, but it worth every minute you spend doing it. The new design will provide the best mobile experience to your clients. Needless to say, a poorly designed website will lower the ability of your content to generate leads through the app.
One sure way of doing this is making sure that your content shines through with as few distractions as possible. This means that you need to remove unnecessary elements such as graphs, tables, and other additional clunky elements that are not displayed well on small screens.
In the process of improving your content design, you might have to make the tough decision of stripping down website features such as menus, footers, and sidebars. This will make it possible for them to be collapsed or hidden when someone is using the mobile app. Consider disabling hover effects as most mobile devices do not have this functionality.
Too much content will not add any value to your business. Strive to create concise copy that conveys the intended message faster. That is, go straight to the point and if you can replace the blocks of text with an engaging video, go ahead to maximise the mobile experience. Good user experience will encourage more people to use the mobile app to access your services and products.
Fix 3: Speed Optimization
Speed is one of the most critical factors that you need to work on to provide the best user experience to both mobile app users and website visitors. Optimising your website speed will eventually boost your mobile app speed. Here are some of the things that you need to do to achieve this goal.
1: Minify
Minify means reducing the size of your business website CSS, HTML content and JavaScript. You can easily do this by removing unnecessary white code such as;
- Unwanted spaces in your CSS
- The unnecessary code in your website’s JavaScript
- Redundant line breaks in your HTML
Some of the WordPress plugins that you can use for this purpose are Autoptimise and Fast Velocity Minify.
2: Compress
Compressing text has been proven to be effective in increasing speed especially on blogs and other text-reliant websites. Nowadays, most of the content delivery networks allow users to send compressed files. Go ahead and use a reliable tool such as Gzip to compress your text.
3: Maximise Caching
HTTP caching is the process where the browser automatically stores copies of website resources so that they can be reloaded faster in future. It is possible to define how, when, and how long a response can be cached by using HTTP cache header.
Alternatively, you can set your server to attach HTTP Cache-Control header and also set how long the data should be cached. You can do this by adding the header into your website code directly. This will ensure that they are also displayed faster and properly on the mobile app.
4: Images Optimisation
Images and other forms of visuals spur user engagement and convey the intended message to the audience faster and efficiently. If not optimised, the photos will slow down your website and consequently your business mobile application.
Luckily, there are many image optimisation tools that you can use to compress the images. Here are a few examples to get you started.
- Imageflow
- ImageOptim
- Thumbor
- Fastly
- Akamai
5: Animated Content Need to be Formatted Well
One of the most widely used animation formats is GIF. Unfortunately, this format does not always work well on all websites and mobile applications. Using a more suitable video format can significantly ramp up page load speed and reduce file size.
A tool such as FFmpeg can help you convert GIFs into mp4 files in seconds. Effective Type API can help you to pinpoint slow bandwidths and display smaller JPEGs instead of animated images automatically. Even though this tool reduces user experience, it is much better than having a website that is unreasonably slow.
Closing Remarks
Your Singapore business mobile app needs to be expertly designed to provide the best user experience to your customers. The website also should have an excellent design to continue steering your business in the right direction. It is time to start leveraging the two to get ahead of the competition and achieve your sales goals in Singapore. Our Singapore website design team can make the required changes to your website to ensure that it loads fast and offers the best user-experience to customers. Get in touch with us for more details.
