Why you need a mobile friendly “responsive” website
With 2.08 billion smartphone users predicted for 2016 and a recent study showing that 79% of responders have their smartphones with them on average of 22 hours a day, now is the time for every website to be mobile friendly. This allows users to easily navigate around your site while using a mobile device. There are two major methods for creating mobile websites: responsive design and mobile templates.
Responsive design requires you only have one website that is coded to adapt to all screen sizes, no matter what the device the website’s being displayed on.
In contrast, a mobile template is a completely separate entity requiring you to have a second, mobile-only website or subdomain. Mobile templates are also built for each specific site, not per screen size. This can cause some issues, so now generally all of our website are built to be “responsive” sites – so that it scales down automatically with different devices, such as phones, tablets, different desktop sizes or a mobile app that shows website content in a slightly different way.
Here are 7 important reasons why you need to make sure your site is viewable on different devices.
#1 Not having a mobile friendly website will effect your search position. You will simply rank lower in search results. Google has announced that mobile websites have become an official ranking factor, forcing the hand of all online businesses to react. Expect to see a decrease in organic search results and a loss in mobile search if you haven’t updated yet.
#2 Users will click off your website quickly if they are having a bad user experience because they have to zoom in, links are hard to click on or the site navigation is unclear. This will cause a high bounce rate and affect your conversion rates.
#3 Not having a mobile friendly website makes your company looks less reputable, or behind with the times.
#4 Having a website optimized for smartphone users will increase load times and data can be seen sooner, rather than waiting for a whole desktop website to upload with increased data from graphics, images and code files.
#5 Using search functions on mobile devices has also seen a huge rise. Users are always looking for the search bar on relative sites for information, products or services. The search function should be clear, designed well and easy to use. We recommend the search function available on all pages near the top of the website.
#6 Customer engagement stats from a Google document: What users want most from mobile sites today revealed;
-74 percent say they are likely to return to a company’s site in the future, if it is a mobile-friendly site.
-48 percent feel frustrated and annoyed if a company doesn’t have a mobile-friendly site.
-52 percent are less likely to engage with a company that has no mobile website.
#7 Decision making with business owners is now taking place with the use of smartphones in meeting rooms across the globe. The mobile platform has become a powerful tool in the word of business activities.
Want to test if your website is mobile friendly? Click here to run it through the test from Google.
Contact us for more information on how we can help make your site a responsive one.
