Moblie Blog Design: To Sidebar or Not To Sidebar
Have you noticed How Much you use your mobile devices, especially smart phones? Well web statistics show Google was right in predicting the demand for mobile first search and content over 10 years ago. As of this year Mobile has finally overtaken PC for search volume accounting for 50.4% of all searches according to TechJury.
This leads to the question of side bars in a world of mobile blog design.If you haven't looked at your website or blog in a while by mobile phone, unless you have a dedicated mobile theme your content appears in this order on blog post pages.
- Header
- Post Headeline
- Post
- Post Meta Data
- Related Post reccomendations (some themes or by Plugin)
- Comments
- Finally sidebars
- Finally Footer Widgets
- Footer Bar
Fact is 99% of your mobile readers will get as far as comments and return to the top of the page or if you have a static menu go to other pages if they haven;t left your site entirely.
Now, I am not saying sidebars are not effective entirely, but gone are the days of them being a great sorce of promotion or navigation. Because of some site's over use of advertising on them many people ignore the sidebar entirely.
Blogs that are fluid width, large text, and image rich perform better as less distracting to the readers. Using your Primary and secondary menus to deliver a well rounded but uncluttered navigation will definitely be more effective in mobile and desktop as people get use to viewing sites this way.
I for one am planning to remove sidebars from most of my sites and with the exception of the front page on my Local SEO and Website Design site I will be replacing footer widgets
How does this bode for SEO?
Well you are reducing the amount of required HTML and Javascript from your pages to allow these pages to load faster on all devices especially mobile where we need to load fully in under 3 seconds to stay competitive. This also will improve text to HTML ratio, and help your keywords have greater density. It will further increase the ease of use and customer experience and may even boost multiple page visits and time on site.
In all I expect it to be a boon for my SEO and above all User experience.
Andy Zeus Anderson
Affiliate 3 Percent
dotLocal SEO
Recent Comments
37
Andy,
Thank you for sharing this with us. This is some very interesting information and statistics.
For my MMO website, I have limited my sidebars widgets and they only appear on individual posts, not on my home page. I am working on doing the same for my niche website as well.
I'm hoping that will bump up the Mobile Site Speed some.
Barbara
I think my biggest boost is from dropping footer widgets. They add unused Javascripts and CSS for most blogs because most blogs don't make use of them at all. But yes if you use sidebars minimalizing their use will help with overall look and feel and keep people focused on your content.
Andy,
I really don't use footer widgets, so I'm good there. I just have to go through every and see which widgets aren't attracting my audience as well as they should be and maybe eliminate the ones that aren't.
Barbara
I also thought about removing the sidebar, but I don't know if the rest of my content will be as visible if I don't have it anymore. But I find that aesthetically, it does not look very pretty. Maybe there would be a problem with SEO as well.
Ingrid
No problems with the SEO just pros, better keyword density, faster page loads, and less clutter.
Great advice and I know when publish I check my mobile first to see how it looks. Its looks great. One of the challenges seems to be on tablets, my kindle fire, horizontally it is fine but vertically not so.
You might need a fluid width tables plugin so the resize to the screen automatically. WP has always had trouble getting tables perfect.
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Yes! Thank you Andy. I have always loved a wide page with tons of pictures and a couple of videos maybe. I agree with you. The sidebar is a distraction, especially on a mobile. I couldn't get anyone to agree with me.
I guess it's also a matter of preference, right? Have a great weekend.
Everyone can have their preference, I was placed here in this spot to talk performance and performance-wise I am impressed by my findings on this. Still I will design customer sidebars if clients still want the after reading about this study I am doing.