5 Ways To Improve Long-Scroll Websites
Nowadays every web-designers main aim is to create a website that is:
- • Easy to use and navigate through
- • Simple, thus doesn’t need much time to load
- • Equipped with every element a user might need.
In the 21st century, it comes as no surprise that smart devices own the majority share of the market. Mobile phones are even used to shop online, now more than ever. It seems like PCs and laptops have lost all their charm and have been replaced.
So, it becomes absolutely essential to make sure your website doesn’t let your customers down. One such factor, that usually doesn’t quite meet the user’s expectations is long-scroll websites. In this article, we will talk about 5 ways to improve long-scroll mobile websites.
Long-scroll websites are very problematic often for the majority of the customers. You may have noticed that scrolling quickly becomes boring, navigation is very unfriendly and footer elements’ absence throughout the whole length, makes it almost impossible to have users, who will scroll all the way to the end just to go to the next page.
Because most of the horizontal design elements become stalked on mobile phones, the difference between the first glance on laptops and on smartphones is, of course, different. Not seeing what they expected – is usually the reason most of them hit the “back” button.
Now that we clearly understand the problems these websites have, let’s try to come up with a few solutions. I came up with five:
- 1. PRIORITIZE WEB CONTENT – mostly the reason mobile phones have the problems mentioned above, is that they all have too much content on the website. The quantity and the quality of your website content is the main part of the design equation. More than half of users say that they will never recommend a company with a poorly designed mobile website. So, it is very important to decide what is it in your design, that attracts the visitors more? Make sure, your most important content displays at the top of the page.
- 2. CAREFULLY POSITION CTAs (Call-To-Action) – the first scroll usually decides if a visitor stays on your page or not. It is important to place all the core information and CTA buttons where they’re most accessible, but they are not blocking the view to the site’s other design elements. So, things that you feel first timers will need (like search field, main menu items, live chat service), should not have to be looked for.
- 3. STAY AWAY FROM FANCY SCROLLING – for all of you who don’t know what parallax scrolling is let’s elaborate on what I mean by “fancy scrolling”. Parallax scrolling is when a website’s background has multiple layers over each other. The further back the design elements are, the slower they move when scrolling. On one hand, you may think that beautiful design is a plus, but the less simple webpages are, the less time they need to load. Webpages that have parallax scrolling take a lot more time to load so, they are more likely to be abandoned in the loading process.
- 4. GET RID OF DUPLICATE ELEMENTS – on normal desktop websites, the navigational elements are usually repeated in the footer, so visitors won’t have to scroll back up every time. On mobile websites, you can fix the footer where most convenient and better accessible to thumbs – the top, bottom or sides.
- 5. HIDE UNNECESSARY DESKTOP ELEMENTS – When it comes to deciding what to eliminate on mobile sites one thing should come to mind is the footer navigation, that lists all contents of all main menu items. When it comes to creating an easy to use mobile webpage, these are certainly not necessary.
To sum up, to progress at the same rate as today’s mobile-first generation, you need to make certain changes to adapt. Creating a customer-friendly mobile website is only the beginning.
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