With more people now using mobile devices to access the web than traditional devices such as desktops, brands, blogs and businesses the world over have to accommodate these visitors. Seeing as how the mobile user experience often presents unique challenges, it is crucial to produce content and design elements that work well with smaller screens, lower resolutions and different inputs.

SEO now heavily requires mobile optimizations for ideal results, but the optimizations don’t have to cease once those criteria are met. Improving overall mobile user experience can help create more loyal visitors and influence how people perceive your brand. Let’s take a look at some improvements that can go a long way toward doing just that.

Improve Image Performance

Standard mobile optimizations may help portions of each page render more effectively depending on the browser and resolution, but that doesn’t mean everything is optimized. One key area in which additional optimizations are ideal is images. By default, standard images that load easily on desktop devices may be scaled down and/or fit seamlessly on mobile screens, but failing to reduce their size and/or utilizing compression will increase page load times. You can start pinging servers with more mobile-friendly images by scaling down their size and using lossless compression, both of which will help improve loading times for mobile users.

Implement Optimized Rendering

When pages take long to load, they take even longer on most mobile devices. This can cause definite losses in traffic among mobile users who have better things to do with their time than wait around on your website to load. Thankfully, it is quite easy to find a workaround to this – even for sites that naturally need longer to load. The concept of optimized rendering helps load content above the fold first (along with essential elements such as text), and proceeds to load the remainder of the page in pieces.

Rather than having to wait for the full page to load, optimized rendering allows visitors to immediately begin absorbing content – this will likely improve the user’s experience and result in lower bounce rates.

Experiment Yourself

While improving user experience may feel a bit abstract initially, you can improve the process by trying it yourself. Using only your mobile device, sit down and begin navigating your website. Experiment with various actions, clicking on different links, browsing different pages and accessing various files or documents on-site. By doing so, you’ll get an idea first-hand of what mobile users are experiencing.

Additionally, finding a few friends to help you do the same can produce better results. By asking them to record their thoughts about what works, what feels awkward and what could be otherwise changed, you’ll get some free feedback that’ll likely improve user experience for a large percentage of your visitors.

There are many tweaks and optimizations that can be made to improve mobile user experience. For those who’ve already started pinging servers with mobile responsive design, a good foundation is already in place. You can expand on that by implementing optimized rendering for each page, ensuring images are ideal for mobile browsing and experimenting with the site first-hand to gather more ideas for potential changes.