Now more than ever, focusing on mobile audiences pays huge dividends. With the sheer proliferation of tablets, smartphones and other mobile gadgets, most people who access the internet use devices other than standard desktop and laptop computers. This huge shift definitely has an impact on brands, as the browsing experiences of visitors can be quite different due to different screen resolutions and methods of user input.

Optimizing your website for mobile audiences is absolutely vital in today’s digital climate. In order to do so, we’ve put together a few steps you should take to improve the mobile user experience.

Optimize for a Mobile-Social Experience

In some corners of the internet, there is now more traffic being driven to websites from social media than from search engines. This is a huge development – and one that impacts how websites are to be designed in the future. Combined with most internet traffic now coming from mobile devices, a mobile responsive experience should consider how to best integrate aspects of social media with its interface.

Besides maintaining a social media presence on as many platforms as possible (to ensure your content achieves maximum reach), integrating key aspects of your website with social media just makes sense. From using Facebook logins in lieu of stand-alone user accounts to automatically pinging servers on social media with your latest posts, consider mobile and social media now joined at the hip.

Ask for Feedback

In designing the very best website possible for your mobile audience, you should first inquire what mobile users would like to see. If your current version is optimized for mobile in a basic sense, then you may already have the basics covered. However, specific elements may be off or otherwise not perfected for those on smartphones and tablets.

If you have not yet built a mobile-responsive website, then consultation with web designers would be the best decision. These professionals can provide you with tips on what mobile users value and which elements should be focused on; of course, these professionals can also be enlisted to build the entire website from scratch as well.

Go Big (and Small)

All too often, the primary problem with standard web designs is that the elements are too small for mobile devices with smaller resolutions. Everything from photos to links can appear much smaller (or larger) on mobile devices, making the user experience terrible.

For elements such as navigation, social media and anything that needs to be clicked, maximizing size is crucial in ensuring a truly mobile responsive design. In terms of formatting images and other aesthetic elements, ensuring they are responsive – and that their sizes are based on a percentage of the screen rather than a fixed size – will dramatically improve usability.

Whenever mobile users are pinging servers for information, products or entertainment, functionality is key. You can only secure mobile audiences by offering a website that functions properly with their devices; otherwise, the competition stands to steal these users from you. By integrating social media with your broader mobile strategy, ensuring elements are properly sized and soliciting feedback from users and professionals, you’ll create a killer mobile website that performs as intended.