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Making your site mobile friendly

Home / Blog / Making your site mobile friendly

Written by Giles Bennett

One of the most common questions we get asked is 'How do I make my Magento site mobile-friendly?'. In web developer circles this is called making a site responsive.

A responsive site is one on which the elements on the page respond to the screen width of the device it's being viewed on.

When we make an e-commerce site responsive, we choose the elements of the site which we want to display and those that we don’t when the desktop real-estate starts to shrink. These elements can either be existing parts of the desktop site or can be specially redesigned responsive versions.

Another issue is how elements behave on touch-screen devices - on this site, the menu on desktops reacts to the mouse hovering over it, but on most mobile devices you can't hover, so the menu wouldn't work. Responsive site design means that hover menus convert, on smaller screen widths, to menus which are opened and closed by mouse clicks, so that they work on mobiles and tablets.

Everyday, there seems to be a new type of device brought onto the market - tablets, phablets, mobiles, even now we're seeing the rise of so-called 'wearable tech'. A well thought out responsive site should automatically adapt, making your site as future-proof as possible.

With these changes, our client's mobile conversion rate increased by 138% - customer approval, which couldn't be measured with such accuracy, also went through the roof.

If you'd like to talk to us about making your site responsive, or increasing conversion rates on mobile devices, then please get in touch.

Author : Giles Bennett

About the author

Giles Bennett built his first website in 1996, and is old enough to miss Netscape Navigator. Initially a lawyer, he jumped ship to IT in 2008, and after 5 years as a freelancer, he founded HummingbirdUK in 2013. He can be reached by email at giles@hummingbirduk.com.