Mobile Optimization: Why It Matters for Lead Generation

Check your own analytics before taking anyone else's number for this: the share of your traffic that arrives on a phone depends on your industry, your audience and where your ads run. For most businesses running paid social or search ads, it is the majority. That single fact should shape how the page is built, not how it is checked at the end.

Design for the phone first

A desktop page narrowed to phone width is not a mobile page. The hierarchy that works across a wide screen - headline left, image right, form below - becomes a long scroll where the form is the last thing anyone sees. Decide what the first screenful must contain, and let the desktop layout be the adaptation.

• Put the form, or a button that jumps to it, within the first screenful.
• Make tap targets large enough to hit with a thumb, with space between them.
• Use the right keyboard: an email field should bring up the email keyboard, a phone field the number pad.
• Avoid anything that requires hovering, because there is no hover on a phone.
• Test on a real device on a real connection, not only in a desktop browser resized.

Speed is a mobile problem

Phones are often on slower and less reliable connections than the machine a page was designed on. Large hero images are the usual culprit. A page that takes several seconds to show anything useful has lost visitors who never appear in your conversion rate, because they never got far enough to be counted.