For South African nonprofits trying to reach communities that access the internet primarily through smartphones, mobile optimisation is essential infrastructure. If your mobile site is slow or broken, you're making your organisation harder to find, even when people search for exactly what you do.

Let me tell you what nobody wants to admit: your website probably looks great on your office laptop and absolutely terrible on the device people use more commonly. Unfortunately, beautiful desktop sites can turn unusable the moment someone tries to navigate them with their thumb.

According to GeoPoll's 2025 study on smartphone and social media usage in Africa, 98% of respondents use smartphones as their primary mobile device, with 85% using them to browse the internet. Meanwhile, mobile data in South Africa costs around R85 per gigabyte on prepaid plans. Every second your site takes to load is burning through your visitor's data and patience.

I said in a previous post that “A quick, mobile-friendly website with clear navigation will always win over a bloated, keyword-stuffed one.” I expand on what this means below.

The Real Cost of a Slow Mobile Site

When someone lands on your donation page from their phone and it doesn't load quickly, they don't wait. They leave. Google's research shows that 53% of mobile users abandon sites that take longer than three seconds to load.

For nonprofits, the risk is a loss of support from people interested in what you do.

But there is good news: most mobile optimisation problems have solutions that don't require a developer, content strategist, or significant budget.

Three Changes You Can Make

Most mobile optimisation problems have solutions that don't require a developer, content strategist, or significant budget.

1. Compress Your Images Properly

Large images can be quite prickly. A hero image (web design term for the first image people see) should be under 200KB and not 2MB or larger.

This is because it’s the first thing that loads. If it takes forever - or, worse, isn’t sized correctly for their screens- then viewers are far less inclined to see what else you offer.

I have three steps to resize and compress my images:

1. Use Canva to resize images to 1280-1920 pixels wide. All you need to do is find a template that matches this size and upload your image onto it. 
2. Before uploading, run images through a free tool like TinyPNG or Image Compressor.
3. Rename the image to match your ranking keywords.

Hint for WordPress users: Install Smush (free version available) to compress automatically as you upload

2. Make Buttons Easy to Tap

Mobile users navigate with their thumbs, not a cursor. If your "Donate Now" button is too small or crammed next to other links, people will misclick.

Every additional form field increases the chance someone abandons the process. Typing on mobile is harder, and people notice.

As with images, there is an industry standard:

• Buttons should be at least 48x48 pixels with adequate spacing. This matters most for your crucial actions, like donation buttons, volunteer sign-ups, contact forms.

Check your navigation menu on a phone. If menu items are squashed together, visitors will tap the wrong thing and leave out of frustration.

3. Fix Your Forms

Every additional form field increases the chance someone abandons the process. Typing on mobile is harder, and people notice.

Some industry best practices here:

• Only ask for essential information
• Use correct input types (type="tel" for phone numbers, type="email" for emails) so phones show the right keyboard
• Enable autofill
• Put labels above fields, not beside them, so they don't vanish on narrow screens

And if your volunteer form has 15 fields, ask yourself if you really need all that information upfront. You probably don't.

Test Your Site the Way Your Audience Experiences It

Desktop testing won't reveal mobile problems. Here's what actually works:

• Google PageSpeed Insights: Visit PageSpeed Insights, enter your URL, run mobile and desktop tests. It'll flag specific issues and suggest fixes. Pay attention to Core Web Vital as these directly affect your Google ranking.
• Test on actual devices: Open your site on a smartphone using 3G or 4G, not Wi-Fi. Go to your donation page. Fill out a form. If you're frustrated, imagine what your on-the-fence visitors felt.
• Check your analytics: Look at mobile bounce rates and session duration on your Google Analytics. If mobile users leave quickly while desktop users stay longer, your mobile experience needs work.

When to Get Help

Many of these fixes are manageable if you're using WordPress with the right plugins. But if your site has persistent issues, like layouts shifting around, scripts loading incorrectly, and features breaking on mobile, consider hiring help.

South Africa has a growing digital agency scene and a plethora of specialist freelancers who are willing to help. Don't struggle alone if the problems are beyond your skill set.

Mobile Optimisation in South Africa

For South African nonprofits trying to reach communities that access the internet primarily through smartphones, mobile optimisation is essential infrastructure.

If your mobile site is slow or broken, you're making your organisation harder to find, even when people search for exactly what you do.

More importantly, this isn't about chasing digital trends. It's about meeting your audience where they are. When someone hears about your work and searches for you on their phone during lunch, you have seconds to make a connection. Make those seconds count.

 Photo Credit: Aleksei Gorodenkov from Noun Project (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)