It’s been years now that use of mobile devices has been increasing and increasing. Soon enough most people will browse the internet on their phone or tablet or even phablet. Consumer’s habits have changed let’s face it. They jump from one device to another. Apple understood that trend and let you start one task on your phone, finish it on your laptop and wrap it on your desktop smoothly. But let’s look at numbers.
Statistics on mobile usage
According to recent studies, 80% of people are using a smartphone. A few years ago, analysts were predicting that by 2014 mobile would overtake fixed internet access. We are very very close to that tipping point by now.
Having a mobile friendly website is a must!
With those numbers you can understand easily why having a website that simply matches habits of the end user is a must. Why?
Think User Experience
On a mobile device, user experience is totally different. It’s most likely touch screen, the screen is smaller, you don’t have a mouse, keyboard is tiny and not as efficient as your regular keyboard with your laptop or desktop. If you have big hands, good luck;) You need to allow your users to browse your site with those restrictions and giving them what they need faster, better without having to zoom in or zoom out, turn the phone around, etc.
Be User Friendly
Passed the technical specificities of a mobile device, you don’t want to lose your visitors. Its content needs to be adapted to the size of the device. On mobile, visitors are looking for something specific. They want an information and they want it fast. Otherwise they might wait to get home to check it on a computer if they still think about it or simply give up and you just lost a potential customer. You probably had or still have that same experience when you are looking for something, find a website and you have to zoom in to read the text, scroll to read the end of a sentence, then zoom out again because you don’t know where you are on the page, etc. That’s a horrible experience.
Even Google started to display mobile friendly websites in its search results. Users have now a clear choice whether they want to visit a mobile friendly site made especially for them or struggle with an old site complicated to browse. Of course, you can imagine, knowing Google that this will impact your Search Engine Optimization at least on mobile if not overall.
Check Google Mobile Friendly Test:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/
Visitors Habits
Last but not least, it is imperative to have a mobile friendly website just because this is how people browse the internet these days. If you already know that 80% of people browsing the internet own a smartphone, you would be purposely ignoring a LOT of potential customers. According to Google mobile users are look for information such as address, phone number, directions, schedule…these are the information you want to provide fast and easily. Wouldn’t be great to call you just on a click of a button?
For local businesses it’s a must. it’s been proven that a visitor out of two is visiting a website before driving to the location and over 20% of these visits will conclude in a sale.
So, it’s 2015, don’t wait any longer and get your visitors what they expect: a mobile friendly website. If you were lucky from the get-go, who ever designed your website made it responsive, which means that its content adapts to the viewing experience of any device. If not…well it’s never too late 🙂
Learn more about responsive design:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsive_web_design
Do you have questions? Do you need help with your website? Do you want a free audit? Contact Us.
