Why Should Mobile Websites Matter Landscape Designers? 65 percent of all digital media time is spent on a mobile device and desktop usage is down to 35 percent of digital time spent.

ComScore 2016 - US Cross-Platform Future in Focus

If you're a landscape designer with an online portfolio, a responsive design website is a good start. Having a gallery of images on a Squarespace website requires that you ensure your images and design are mobile friendly and Google AMP enabled.

Optimizing your landscape design firm's Squarespace website for mobile requires a little planning especially when it comes to gallery pages. Squarespace is template based and they understand the importance the importance of mobile compatibility. Most templates are already mobile-ready but functionality depends on properly formatted content including image sizes, letter spacing and quantity of content on the page. Keeping your landscape design firm's website mobile friendly and relevant to search engines requires a thoughtful design approach regarding size, type and layout of your content.

What follows are some best practices and SEO tips that can make designing your website for mobile easier, friendlier, and keep it SEO ready.

Mobile Compatibility and Design

Squarespace templates already incorporate mobile compatibility by offering built-in styles and responsive design to automatically resize your content depending on the size of the browser window on the device on which it is viewed. While the templates are mobile compatible, it's how you design them and format your information and photographs that affects how your site performs, loads, looks and appears in search results. 

Here are a few best practices you can incorporate in your interior design firm's mobile website that can help you maintain SEO and improve your search engine ranking.

Keep Page Content To A Minimum

When a visitor checks out your site on a mobile device, that device downloads all of the content at once. Because mobile devices rely on simple hardware and cellular networks for internet access, requesting large amounts of data can be problematic and slow load speeds. Search engines use page load times as a factor when determining page ranking. Try to keep data below 5MB per page to ensure faster load times. This means reducing image file size with tools like Jpeg Mini and Adobe's Photoshop Elements.

Limit Embedded Content

Just like images, YouTube or Vimeo videos and podcasts can be data intensive. Limit embedded content to keep load times fast. Use click throughs URLs or index pages to spread video content over several pages. A single page used as a gallery of multiple videos will harm a mobile websites user experience and will contribute to lower search engine optimization results. Instead, create a page of small image based call to action buttons that link to pages that contain a single video and text explaining what they will learn.

Use Blog Excerpts

Blogs are the most valuable marketing effort you can employ to attract new customers, but if they don't show well on mobile their value is limited. Use a one or two sentence excerpt to introduce content followed by a “read more” link or target URL to take readers to the complete content. You add this sentence as a meta description in the  Settings -> Options area when creating a blog post. Excerpts can reduce load times significantly because the entire post doesn't need to load.

Reduce The Number of Images Per Page

Because all data is loaded at once, it is cumulative and includes images. Image-heavy pages can take a long time to fully load. As a landscape design firm, images are a key to developing your brand. Long load times can turn off viewers. For example, if your gallery has ten 500KB images (the perfect size for mobile) the device loads all 5MB at once. Try rotating images within Gallery Pages and Gallery Blocks to keep pages fresh and quick loading. Display your best images and include links to other galleries on your website.

Reduce Image File Sizes

As a landscape design firm, you should have lots of relevant images on your site. Multiple large image files can slow loading so optimize images keeping them to 500KB with a 1500 pixel width. To follow best practices, use an image compression program like Jpeg Mini to reduce file sizes without sacrificing quality.

By using these best practices when designing and building your Squarespace mobile website you can keep it user-friendly, easier to load, and reap the benefits of better search engine ranking. Squarespace templates are mobile ready, but it depends on how you use elements like content and images that can keep your site relevant to search engines and drive traffic to your landscape design firm's website.

About Michael Conway

I'm the owner and strategist at Means-of-Production. My firm builds Squarespace websites, Houzz profiles, and content marketing and advertising solutions for architects, interior designers, design-build contractors and landscape design firms. Our all-in-one marketing tactics attract the right clients with exceptional architectural photography and brand messaging that sets you apart from the competition. Give us a call and we'll create a quick video analysis of your website, online marketing efforts, blog, or Houzz page.