Have you visited your website on a smart phone recently, navigating through each individual page? No? It’s easy to neglect this step during the website-building process, but the performance of your site on mobile devices is increasingly important.

There will be 1.7 billion mobile Internet users by next year alone, and 80 percent of customers abandon a site—potentially forever—if they have a bad mobile experience. That’s a pretty huge reason to make sure your website is navigable via mobile devices.

So how should you go about ensuring your readers have an optimal mobile viewing experience?

Start by visiting http://www.howtogomo.com Google’s mobile measurement initiative. There you will find a tool called the GoMoMeter through which you can enter your website URL and receive an idea of what your website looks like to consumers, a mobile-friendliness ranking, and some other statistics on your site’s mobile performance. How’d you do?

If your website isn’t exactly measuring up, you might start with a simple solution—installing a mobile plugin. If your website is on a Wordpress platform, Copyblogger suggests installing WP Touch for a thirty-second solution; just be sure to also allow viewers the option to view the full, non-mobile site.

Simply installing the plugin shouldn’t be the be-all end-all of your mobile efforts, however. Luckily, the hallmark of good mobile site design is simplicity. A clean, comprehensible webpage is the way to go and shouldn’t be too much of a time burden.

Be wary of using too many images and don’t rely at all on Flash or Javascript. Make your navigational tools easy to understand and read. Write concise, compelling website for your site, and prioritize certain pieces of information so that mobile users can get where they need to be quickly.

You should make sure the buttons on your site are easily clickable and enable the site to correspond to screen size. If a viewer has to zoom in 1,000 percent simply to click the correct link or read your content, you’re likely losing users.

You should also be sure that your website takes advantage of mobile phone capabilities. Features like click-to-call and map-enabled locations should be work with your site. You might also consider having author interviews launch within a YouTube app or linking your ‘buy book’ button to the Amazon app, increasing ease of usability for your mobile fans.

As you perform updates on and add new content to your website, check the site regularly on HowToGoMo and on your own (or friends’) phones. And don’t forget to view your website on a number of different mobile platforms—Android, the iPhone’s iOS, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, and many more.