Are you planning on undergoing a major responsive design project for your eCommerce site? If so, it’s important that you become aware of the common mistakes that are made with responsive design. These mistakes can cost you a lot of time and money which is a big deal because you’re already in the middle of transitioning your website with the responsive move.
1. Not Optimizing for Speed
Internet and processing speeds are much slower on mobile devices. That’s why you have to optimize your website for speed. This is especially the case with eCommerce sites that have tons of pages and images that are presented to users. To optimize for speed, you may have to condense your pages and redo your images so that they are smaller file sizes. This will improve the user experience which will make shopping on your site as seamless as it is on a desktop computer.
2. Creating Call to Action Links That Are Too Small
A common mistake that companies make when going responsive is making their call to action links/buttons too small. This usually happens when the links/buttons are scaled to fit to the size of mobile device screens. You have to ensure that your links/buttons are easily clickable by users that are going to be browsing your site on a smartphone. Not being able to click on links or being put in a situation where unwanted links get pressed can be frustrating to users and hurt your click to sale conversions.
3. Not Redesigning the UI and UX
If you’ve worked on your desktop site’s UI and UX, don’t assume that the benefits will transfer over to the responsive site. You will have to redo the UI and UX design for the mobile devices. You can’t forget that there is a limited screen real estate. This calls for a lot of optimization so that browsing and understanding how to use the website is made simple and intuitive in the mobile context.
4. Not Testing for Optimal Performance
Don’t assume that your data will translate to the mobile version of your responsive site. Although it is a lot of work, you will have to test your mobile responsive version extensively. This is because your UI and UX will be different for the mobile version of your responsive site. You have to track user behavior and test different elements to optimize for the ideal actions and conversions.
5. Not Organizing Your Web Development
Because this is a big undertaking, you have to be organized every step of the way. You have a lot of things to think about. You may want to roll out the new site in the month where sales are typically lower. You will want to have a flow chart that breaks down the project step by step. You will want to set up milestones for the web development team to hit. The bottom line is that you have to be prepared so that you can make the redesign as seamless as possible.