Mobile-Optimised Websites in Healthcare

11th Apr 2024

Why is a mobile-friendly healthcare website important?

Search engines such as Google have caught on to this shift and now operate on mobile-first indexing. This means web crawlers prioritise indexing the mobile version of a website versus the desktop version, and Google’s algorithms primarily use the mobile version of a website to rank pages and draw snippets from. Therefore, it is very important that any website’s mobile version is well-optimised and functional; if not, this failure to meet requirements will be reflected in organic search rankings.

The Importance of accessibility for mobile Pharma and Healthcare Sites

It is incredibly important to consider the digital accessibility of sites, in particular those that deal with important topics under the pharma and healthcare umbrella. Access to healthcare information that aids both patients and HCPs in staying healthy and educated, supplementing or informing treatment, needs to be reliable and easy. The device the user has access to, for example, should not impact their ability to access such important information — although previous research has suggested this is not always the case.

As an example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, mobile devices were often the most effective way for people to seek medical treatment or advice. However, older adults may be unable to use mobile devices (or to use them to the same level as younger people) for healthcare or pharmaceutical services. This is a major issue as not only does this speak to an inequality in healthcare content access depending on mobile phone use skill sets, older adults who often have less skill using mobile devices have higher long-term demand for medicines. This reflects the gap in the use of digital health technologies among different age groups and highlights the need for mobile websites to be as accessible and easy to use as possible, especially for essential healthcare information. 

Optimising healthcare sites for mobile users as a form of digital accessibility should, therefore, be a priority, even in a post-COVID world. Indeed, many studies have called for global legislation surrounding accessibility and universal design principles as an urgent necessity to avoid repeating many of the accessibility issues that were brought to light during the COVID-19 pandemic.

How to conduct a mobile site health check

So, how can you check that a healthcare or pharma site is optimised for mobile? There are many tools you can use to check how mobile-friendly a site is, three of the easiest being:

Google Search Console: If you have Search Console set up for your site, this free tool includes its own mobile-friendly tests and metrics. Under the Page Experience heading, GSC will show the Core Web Vitals for both your site’s mobile and desktop versions. Clicking through to the mobile section will identify which URLs are deemed “poor,” “need improvement,” and “good.” Data about specific issues will be available here, identifying areas for improvement for best mobile optimisation and suggesting fixes.

Page Speed Insights: If you do not have access to GSC for your site, the web-based tool https://pagespeed.web.dev/ allows you to simply enter the URL of your site, where it will perform an analysis of overall site speed and core web vitals for both the mobile and desktop performance of a site. This tool will return an overall performance score for a mobile site, alongside key metrics such as first contentful paint (time taken for the first bit of content to be rendered), largest contentful paint (time taken for the largest element to render) and cumulative layout shift (how much the page shifts around while loading). Furthermore, suggestions for site improvements will also be returned, streamlining the improvement process.

Test it yourself!: One of the best and easiest ways to test how well a site is optimised for mobile is to simply use a mobile device to browse the site. Try navigating around the site, noting where links are difficult to find or click, where images seem too large/small, where the layout does not make the best use of space, where content is obstructed or hard to see entirely etc. For healthcare and pharmaceutical websites especially, large amounts of data/ complex diagrams are often hosted – check how easily this information is conveyed to and understood by a human user in a smaller format. By mimicking real human use, you can see in a more ecologically valid way how easily accessible the site is to a human user on mobile and base improvements on this first-hand data. 

Common Areas for Improvement for Mobile Optimisation

There are several key areas that are often part of the mobile optimisation process. As a very surface-level examination of a few key areas to consider, initial focus can be placed on:

• Contrast: There must be sufficient contrast between text and its background, especially on a smaller screen, so that information is clearly visible. Many free online tools, such as WebAIM’s contrast checker, can provide a quantitative metric indicating whether or not a text/background contrast is sufficient.
• Text size: Text should be sufficiently large to be clearly visible and readable on a smaller screen. The ideal font size for mobile screens is 16 pixels, but having the font size set to be responsive in the site’s CSS allows for easy scaling based on screen size. Always ensure the text size for a mobile site is tested on a variety of live mobile devices for the best impression of how your site will display on mobile.
• Navigation/ menus: For best accessibility, it is important to consider how your site’s menus and navigation will display on a smaller screen, with the ability to switch between portrait and landscape orientation. Typically, mobile navigation is in a separate tab menu. Having navigation hidden away while the user browses the site means more important site content is visible, making for a better user experience.
• Images: Ensure images are served in next-gen formats where possible and keep image size to a minimum through compression. Once again, size and layout should be considered when displaying images on a smaller screen. Images on healthcare websites (such as diagrams, iconography, etc.) should complement and enhance existing content and not take away from important information in their size and positioning. 

Conclusion

To conclude, pharma and healthcare websites must be well-optimised for mobile-first indexing with a new era of mobile-first indexing and heavier mobile internet use. From both a user experience and digital accessibility point of view, having such important information be clearly and easily accessible is the responsibility of the website owners, and care should be taken to regularly test for and implement improvements to a website’s mobile performance.

If you require any help or consultation regarding the mobile optimisation of your pharmaceutical or healthcare website, please do not hesitate to contact Varn Health for expert, bespoke advice on mobile site performance and improvements focusing on SEO.

Additional references:

https://www.medicodigital.co.uk/user-experience-that-converts/

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2016/11/mobile-first-indexing