Mobile-friendly websites can be displayed on hand-held or mobile devices, including a tablet, an iPad, or an iPhone. These website designs (often known as responsive web designs) respond to any display or device. This approach suggests that development and design should respond to the user’s environment and behavior based on orientation, platform, and screen size.
Most Americans are glued to their smartphones these days and rely on them heavily to search for services and products, interact with friends on social media, keep up with the latest news updates, and respond to emails. In February 2020, mobile device clicks for one of our personal injury law firm clients more than doubled the number of desktop clicks (9,111 clicks vs. 4,022 clicks).
If you want to learn more about how to make your business mobile-friendly, including what type of content you should use, read on.
What Are Mobile-Friendly Websites?
As previously mentioned, mobile-friendly websites are formatted to display properly on smaller screens such as tablets or smartphone devices. As more people continue to access information from their mobile phones, it is important for visitors to not only be able to access your mobile site easily, but to have a positive experience as well. Mobile-friendly sites consider a number of factors, including:
- Download speeds
- Large touch-friendly buttons for navigational purposes
- Navigation that is easy to follow
- Bigger, legible text sizes and content that fits the entire page
The benefits of mobile-friendly websites include:
- Quicker download speeds
- Improved mobile conversion rate
- Streamlined experience across multiple devices
- Increase search rankings
Mobile User Explosion
About 72%, of all internet users (3.7 billion people) will access the web exclusively through their mobile devices by the year 2025. According to a recent report by the World Advertising Research Center (WARC), it is also projected that 1.3 billion people will access the internet through both a PC and a smartphone by the year 2025, while only 69 million people will still use their PCs to access the internet.
WARC currently estimates that around 2 billion people are already using only their smartphones to access the internet, which is equivalent to 51% of the entire global base of 3.9 mobile users.
In the next several years, it’s believed that the time people spend on smartphones will overtake the number of hours people are spending using their PCs to access the internet. This year alone, people will be spending around 22 minutes on their smartphone every day – this beats the time people will spend accessing the internet with a tablet, laptop, or PC.
Why Are Mobile Visitors Important?
You may be wondering why some customers or clients aren’t looking at your site from a mobile device. Over half of all online digital traffic comes through mobile apps or from mobile devices, according to recent studies.
Depending on your industry, this will vary; however, most of our clients see between 25-60% of their traffic coming from mobile devices on average. Would even 25% be a figure worth ignoring? Neglecting to have a website that’s mobile-friendly could impact your overall success in search engines negatively, which is why you may want to start thinking about creating a website that’s more mobile-friendly.
SEO Improvement and Google
Google released a statement on February 26, 2015 regarding how mobile-friendly search results would be handled going forward.
Mobile users care about having access to mobile-friendly content, but Google also cares a lot about the proficiency of a company’s mobile site. For organic search results, it’s important to have a mobile-friendly site. You could receive a penalty for having an “unfriendly” mobile site. Otherwise known as intrusive interstitials, these penalties may result in your website being ranked lower on Google. This is significant, because if your business ranks lower, it won’t be seen first by other mobile users on a given page which, in turn, could impact both your website traffic and online presence overall.
Engagement and Brand
Did you know that mobile websites that offer excellent experiences to mobile users will likely get more business and online foot traffic? Therefore, mobile websites must have proper consistency and functionality, so that users will be able to gain your trust and develop a liking for your website. Accountability and trust are developed when a mobile website can fulfill customer demands seamlessly. Businesses are ultimately better off if they have a mobile-friendly website that can acquire a loyal following.
Mobile-Friendly Checklist
Mobile-friendly websites help businesses with important factors, including brand identity, an all-inclusive user experience, visibility, and so much more. NOVA Advertising always follows this checklist to certify that your mobile-friendly site answers “yes” to these questions with confidence:
- How fast is your page speed? Do pages load in under 3 seconds?
- Is the content easy to read?
- Is your website easy to navigate?
- If the website belonged to someone else, would you still spend time on it?
- Is the overall user experience good?
- Is the main content easy to find?
How to Create a Mobile-Friendly Website
You will need to convert your page to a mobile-friendly format if it’s not optimized for mobile viewing, which requires some level of development. The problem is that there is no simple solution available that can make your site become instantly optimized for mobile devices. But if your current page is well-coded, well-designed, and uses a content management system driven by a database (CMS), you may be able to update your current page templates. If not, then your website might need to be rebuilt and redeveloped entirely. Either way, you can keep your existing content and design scheme the same, or, if you have been planning on redesigning your website anyway, you can combine your mobile-friendly update with a design upgrade that will elevate your company’s entire online presence all at the same time.
You can either develop your main page so that it uses a “responsive design” that can scale to almost any screen size, or you can design a separate optimized mobile site for smartphone devices, which are the most common approaches to mobile websites. There might be certain situations where a separate mobile site may make sense, but the modern standard is responsive design. A single website that works on a variety of different devices including desktops, tablets, and smartphones might be more complicated to develop, but eventually it will become more efficient to maintain a single site instead of multiple sites.
Does Your Business Need a Mobile-Site?
If you are thinking about redesigning your company website or updating it to work across mobile devices, you will need to discuss your plans with an experienced web developer.
NOVA Advertising provides professional web design services that can be catered for any type of business. If you would like for us to give you a complementary evaluation of your company’s website, use this form to contact us, and we’ll be happy to offer you estimates and recommendations for transforming your website into a more modern, efficient business tool.
