Five Things To Consider Before Hiring A Mobile Website Developer

1 – Ask to see your developer’s references and portfolio of mobile websites.

Check out sites they have built. Talk to their references and prior customers to see how they feel about your developer. You can use tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights to look at a developer’s portfolio. PageSpeed Insights highlights factors that hurt a page’s speed or usability.

Google’s Web Fundamentals passes the PageSpeed Insights mobile test for both speed and user experience.

2 – The developer needs to understand your mobile customers.

Tell the developer about your business and provide him/her with the most common tasks you want optimized on the mobile site. Make sure that they develop a site that supports the functionality that mobile customers need. For example, your full website has 50 pages but the top three things mobile customers do is find directions, purchase a product and call your business — so you need to have those three Call To Actions (CTAs) at the top.

3 – Speed is crucial on mobile.

Don’t make customers wait too long for your pages to load in their browsers. Ask if your developer is aware of PageSpeed Insights (the tool above) and if they’re familiar with techniques to help pages load faster.

Or, if that’s too difficult, perhaps get their commitment to a PageSpeed Insights result with a green checkmark which doesn’t have any issues marked “Should Fix”. (If pages don’t receive a green checkmark, it’s up to you and your developer to weigh the costs and benefits of correcting the issue.) Here is some more information about “Quick fixes in mobile website performance“.

4 – Install mobile analytics.

Install mobile analytics such as Google Analytics, so you can collect aggregate information about your site’s performance. You will know how much of the traffic is coming from desktop and how much of it is coming from mobile.

5 – Follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

The guidelines contain information on how Google finds, processes and ranks your site’s content. Using rich snippets and structured data with schema.org will really help your website ranking.

Did your website pass all of these tests? If not, then our team can help. Contact us for a FREE Consultation at 210-582-5842 or check us out at www.DMSapiens.com/Blog.