The Ultimate Guide on How to Optimize Mobile Landing Pages and Improve Conversions

Written by briandordevic | Published 2021/02/21
Tech Story Tags: conversion-optimization | landing-pages | optimize-landing-pages | mobile-landing-pages | improve-lead-conversion | mobile-website | ecommerce | ecommerce-platform

TLDR A landing page is a web page aimed to convert visitors into leads and the next stage of the buyer journey. Landing pages provide you to tell the customers what you expect them to do on a particular page and why they should perform that specific action. The most critical point of a great user experience is the quality of website design that has the potential to engage the users and increase the conversions. The landing pages' goal is to generate leads while pulling the prospects further into the customer funnel. Google has announced that mobile-friendly websites will rank better.via the TL;DR App

Image courtesy of Firmbee on Pixabay.
It's all about the user, and 2021 will be all about the users' experience that is even estimated to become the most important ranking factor for SERPs. And the most critical point of a great user experience is the quality of website design that has the potential to engage the users and increase the conversions.
Since mobile-driven sales and lead generation start to dominate the online environment, you will definitely want to have your website optimized for mobile devices and attain a seamless user experience for your visitors.
Whether the user uses Android or iPhone, the content across your webpage has to fit perfectly every screen size.
Hence, optimization for mobile-friendliness and creating specially designed mobile landing pages is the only sure way of improving conversions through mobile devices.

What are Landing Pages, and Why Do You Need Them?

- A landing page is a web page aimed to convert visitors into leads and the next stage of the buyer journey.
Landing pages provide you to tell the customers what you expect them to do on a particular page and why they should perform that specific action. Since landing pages are designed to make more conversions, the more landing pages, the more conversion opportunities.
And conversion rates are key metrics to benchmark, especially for eCommerce websites.
In some way, landing pages help you guide your customers throughout their buyer journey and allow you to anticipate what they need next.

How Does a Landing Page Convert the Visitors Into Leads?

Usually, a landing page offers a resource in the form of an ebook, free webinar signup, free call, or video in exchange for customers' contact information.
These landing pages' goal is to generate leads while pulling the prospects further into the customer funnel.
Hence, landing pages are an excellent way for audience segmentation and a more personalized marketing approach. Knowing the buyer persona and its buyer journey allows you to target the customers easier later.

Is There a Difference Between a Mobile Website and Mobile Landing Page?

You should know that the mobile website and mobile landing page are not the same things. They are entirely different and yield completely different results as well.
A mobile website is literally a tailor-made website on a separate domain that is supposed to be used on mobile phones only.
A mobile landing page, oppositely, serves to simplify the website's user experience eliminating all the unnecessary page elements and highlighting the most relevant options only that lead to conversion.

How to Check if the Landing Page is Mobile-Friendly?

Google provides its users with a simple and free mobile-friendliness test. All you need to do is typing the URL you want to check, and the results will be listed in a few seconds. It will provide you with an in-detailed report on the issues on your page, listing the type of problematic content and giving you an insight into what to improve.

Why You Need to Build a Mobile Landing Page that Converts:

Mobile devices are starting to rule the online environment overall and the eCommerce environment, too. By taking around 57% of eCommerce traffic, mobile devices start to surpass desktop online shopping experiences.
Besides, mobile-driven sales and eCommerce grow rapidly. For example, compared to desktop conversion rates, average smartphone conversion rates are up 64%.
Even Google has announced that mobile-friendly websites will rank better. So, in case your website and landing pages are still not optimized for mobile devices, it is time to fix this issue and start utilizing all the potentials of web presentations.
Knowing this fact, it is obvious that the prioritization of mobile and users' shopping experiences is a must.
a) Organizing the Navigation
The navigation across the website is essentially vital for a great user experience.
Well-organized navigation is a way of communication with the users providing them shortcuts through your content and directing them to a piece of content they actually want to see.
For that reason, navigation has to be impeccably organized, providing a great user experience.
b) Sticky Headers and Footers
Since navigation is one of the most significant functionalities of the website, it is necessary to make it more accessible. Sticky headers and footers provide that.
Both sticky header and footer have become indispensable components of web design, allowing the user to browse smoothly across the website without performing endless scrolls on the page.
Sticky headers and footers mean they are fixed elements that will always stay visible and in the same place while the user is scrolling.
Headers are crucial because the main menu is always organized there.
c) Site Search and Filter Options
Implementing search box and filter options on a mobile phone landing page will improve the site search in terms of usability. Simple search boxes or advanced filters will help users narrow the search results and find the page or product easier and faster. Site search boxes and filter options are a way of facilitated navigation.
d) Power of Responsive Design: Optimize your Content for Mobile Devices
Using the single-column layouts for organizing the content for mobile devices is the best choice to make since the screen size on mobile devices conditions the usage of multiple columns.
Mobile device users are not keen on reading content that is too long. So, whether the blog posts up to 2000 words convert great on the desktop, it doesn't mean it will record the same results on mobile devices—just the opposite. Mobile users prefer shorter posts, and it is connected with user's habits of content consummation that are changing with the device they use.
The experience of reading the 2000 words blog post on a desktop is just not the same as reading it on the mobile phone screen. And this is the fact content creators should always have in mind.

The Best Ways to Organize Your Copy for Mobile Devices:

First of all, make your landing page's copy shorter than the copy on your desktop version page. This will undoubtedly help you to decrease the bounce rates and increase the time visitors spend on your website.
Secondly, organize your copy.
  • Write a clear, concise copy that will emphasize all the product or service's key points and communicate your message in the right way.
  • Organize the text in paragraphs that will ease the reading experience to the visitor. Also, use readable fonts and pay attention to the sentence length.
  • Use bullets to organize your text better and highlight the points easier. Bullets are incredibly convenient for listing the benefits of the product or service and what the buyer will get if they decide to buy it.
  • Always think about implementing an SEO strategy on your content so that the crawlers could find it easier and present it higher in SERPS.
Click to Call: The Button that Will Boost Your Sales
Making your contact phone clickable and providing your customers to contact you directly from your website can lead your potential customers faster to your business and boost your sales.
The Click to Call button is a feature that provides your visitor to call you in one-click by pressing the static button at the bottom of the screen.
Click to Call button can be added through the HTML or by implementing it through some of the multiple WordPress plugins, such as WP Call Button Block or WP Call Button Block, depending on which page builder you use.
Click to Scroll: The Smooth Scrolling Links
Smooth scrolling saves the visitors of endless scrolling and clicking the X button before they actually find the information they landed on our page for. Smooth scrolling means organized navigation through the content by the linked and clickable headings that enable the visitors to move through the landing page according to their interests.
How Do the Click-to-Scroll Buttons Actually Work?
Instead of manually scrolling down through the page, visitors can quickly jump on the section they are interested in by pressing the specific anchor links.
The anchor links can be created in the form of text or buttons that will directly lead visitors to the landing page's specific part. It can be another paragraph of the text, a link to a contact form, or a call to action. And if your page is a little bit longer, another handy feature on your landing page will be the sticky back-to-top button, which will, again, save the visitor from unnecessary scrolling back to the top of the page.
Besides the click to scroll button is improving the users' experience, it also may decrease a bounce rate up to 40%, which is a rate not to be neglected.
Pop-ups Secrets
Pop-ups are a great way to collect your leads effectively. However, they need to be optimized for mobile devices.
The best way of keeping your pop-ups well-optimized is making them as simple as a possible meaning, limiting the form only to a few fields like the name and email address. The faster your users can fill in the form, the more addresses you will collect.
Matching the pop-up's size to mobile landing page size and providing the users' possibility to close them or opt-out easily are also great ways to improve the users' experience on your mobile landing page.
If you don't want to hurt your Google rankings, it is preferred to set your exit pop-ups on a mobile device after 30-40 seconds after the visitor is actually browsing on your website. Google requires an engaged user, and its algorithm is set to recognize and penalize if the pop-up is being shown right away.
Slow Load Time Speed Kill the Conversions: Optimizing the Load Time Speed
Importance of landing page load time is of tremendous importance in terms of usability, visibility, and conversions.
Since load time speed is a ranking factor, the page has to load skyrocketing. Slow loading pages are considered to have a poor user experience, which consequently has an impact on your conversions. The users expect great results in terms of the site speed, and here is how poor speed results may negatively impact your conversions and revenue overall:
  • A single-second delay in page load time means 7% fewer conversions and 11% fewer page views.
  • 47% of users expect a web page to load in two seconds or less.
  • 40% will abandon a web page if it takes more than three seconds to load.
Multiple factors influence the load time speed, and here are the essentially important elements to be appropriately optimized.
Choose the Right Hosting Option
Not choosing the right hosting option may affect the loading speed tremendously.
There are three hosting options you could choose among:
  • Shared hosting
  • VPS hosting
  • Dedicated server
Shared hosting is the cheapest option, and it could be a great starting point for building your website. However, if you want to scale your business fast, you will need to upgrade to some other hosting plan, so if you strive to attain fast loading pages, maybe you should consider the hosting option.
Minimize HTTP Requests
According to Yahoo research, 80% of a webpage loading time is spent downloading the different parts of the page, scripts, images, stylesheets, etc. Every HTTP request is made for each of these elements, so the more on-page components that have to be loaded, the longer it takes for the page to render.
Figuring out how many HTTP requests are made is the first step to minimize those requests, and in case you use Google Chrome, the browser’s Developer Tools will show you the number of HTTP requests.
Reducing this number of requests will speed up your site, rank it higher and consequently improve the user's experience.
Minify the Files
Once you have a result of how many HTTP requests your site has, it is time to optimize your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files.
These files are extremely important since they determine the particular website's appearance and add the number of HTTP requests.
By minifying and combining the files that will declutter all the unnecessary formatting, whitespace, and code, you will not only reduce the size of each file but the total file numbers as well. And this is especially important for the templated website builders.
The fewer elements on each webpage, the fewer HTTP requests and unburdened the loading time speed.
Optimize the Images
Not resized or compressed photos uploaded in the media library in full resolutions are often the main reason why your loading site speed is low and negatively affects your site speed, ranking positions, and overall users' experience.
Before uploading a photo on the website, make sure to change its size and save it in JPEG or PNG format. You can do it with Adobe® Photoshop, changing the size and resolution, or you can find the free plugins to help you solve this issue.
Don’t Install too Many Plugins
Plugins give an incredible opportunity to enhance your website features and create a better user experience for visitors. However, installing too many plugins can tremendously affect the website speed, which consequently leads to worse ranking positions, and a bad user experience.
The best advice on the acceptable number of installed plugins on your website would be, the less is more. Install only the plugins you actually need and that support your website to function better.
Optimize the Landing Page for Different Types of Connections
Be aware that not all visitors will access the specific webpage or landing page using the same kind of connection. While some of them will use Wi-Fi, others will use 4G LTE access or 3G connections. This means that the page will not load as quickly as for a 4G LTE connection and 3G connection, so the best solution is to optimize your mobile landing pages to load as quickly as on terrible connections.
Use A/B testing extensively for your Mobile Landing Pages
When evaluating mobile landing pages' influence, the performance of A/B testing will be more than useful.
A/B testing can provide you incredible insight into what you should change on your mobile landing pages and improve the conversions. A/B testing means running multiple experiments and performing various changes while testing which elements actually have the most significant impact on conversion rates.
Even the smallest detail has a great impact, so be sure to run simultaneously two different versions of the landing page and analyze all the data carefully before choosing the right version.

Written by briandordevic | Ten years of Web Design and Technical Lead experience with AlphaEfficiency.
Published by HackerNoon on 2021/02/21