Why is it important for your website to be optimised for mobile?
Although it is becoming a less common occurrence these days, occasionally we come across a client with a website that isn’t optimised for mobile devices.
Five years ago, mobile responsiveness was considered an optional extra for many businesses. Those actively concerned with future-proofing did build their sites to respond to different device sizes but a large proportion went with the traditional, now-outdated, method of a static page built with only desktop devices in mind.
Today, having a website that looks great on mobile devices should be at the top of your list when assessing the quality of your web presence. Although hugely dependent on the individual and time of day, our clients find on average that more than 60% of website traffic comes from mobile devices.
Whether it’s while commuting, sat on the sofa, or out and about, when we need to find something out we generally pull out our smart phone and go to Google. When we land on a website that stands out as difficult to use, unclear, or slow, we quickly move away and visit the next result. This common behaviour illustrates the importance of a mobile responsive site.
In short, if your site doesn’t look great on a mobile, you are losing business.
How to tell if your site is mobile-ready?
The best way to tell is the simplest; visit your website on your phone and see if the content resizes. Look at features like your navigation bar and contact forms; is the text easy to read, clear and an appropriate size? Or are you seeing an extremely shrunk-down version of your desktop site?
The other, more quantifiable, way of checking your site’s mobile performance is by using one of the many website score checkers our there:
- Checking responsiveness
https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly
- Checking speed
GTMetrix offer an incredibly in-depth look at the performance of your website.
If you do use a score checker, always take these results with a pinch of salt. We find that for anything bar the smallest websites, an A grade is highly unlikely. Instead a 50% plus score is a good benchmark, this indicates a good user experience.
What to do next?
All tests aside, the most important reason to upgrade your website is to improve the experience of your user. If your site doesn’t look great on a mobile then we can’t stress enough how important it is to get this fixed. You can’t afford to overlook what was the future, and is now very much the present of internet use.
If you would like advice on getting your website up to scratch, give us a call. We’d be happy to help.
