Updated August 2019
In today’s digital age, it’s crucial for you to make your website mobile friendly. Not only do your users want it, but so does Google and its mobile-first indexing. According to Perficient Digital’s Mobile vs Desktop Usage study, the majority of company’s website traffic comes from mobile devices. With that in mind, you should be focused on creating the best mobile experience. To do so, you should understand the benefits of making your website mobile friendly. Take into account that creating a mobile friendly website may require a website redesign.
To check if your website is mobile friendly, use the Google Webmaster Tool. The tool will tell you why your website isn’t mobile friendly and suggest how you can make it compatible for mobile devices.
As mentioned above, Google’s mobile-first indexing algorithm update took effect in March 2018 to reward the mobile websites that follow best practices. Google spiders began crawling the mobile version of a website to determine its page and keyword rankings. Generally, websites that use responsive website design or dynamic serving are set for mobile-first indexing. This measure was aimed at improving how mobile-friendly content performs.
As of July 2018, Google made another algorithm update which penalized slow-loading mobile sites and gave them a lower ranking. Since loading speeds along with proper font sizes, and mobile-friendly layouts affect mobile search ranking, you’ll want to focus on optimizing these features. Ranking higher on Google’s search results will drive more traffic to your website.
Your competition may or may not have a mobile website, but you should certainly have one. If your company’s website is not mobile friendly, your potential customers might turn to your competitors. Creating, updating, and maintaining your mobile website will give you the upper hand on your competition. If your website looks and feels better the second a user lands on it, he’ll be more likely to browse and shop on your site.
By implementing a responsive website design, the webpage will properly adjust and fit to the screen of any device. This responsive website design makes it easier for users to see all the features and content on your site.
An increasing number of people use their mobile devices to easily and quickly buy products on the web. Optimizing your website for mobile use is a strategy that adds benefit to your business by creating an enjoyable browsing or shopping experience.
As mentioned above, a responsive website design improves the user experience by responding to the user’s behavior, screen size, and platform. The same content of the webpage will be on both a desktop and phone, but there are different sets of CSS instructions for each one.
Media queries are a CSS technique that delivers a tailored style sheet to a variety of devices. They determine the size of the device then direct the browser to display the correct CSS set based on the device.
Bootstrap is a CSS framework that includes sensible defaults to automatically scale a website to the appropriate screen size. While Bootstrap makes many things easier, it can make some designs harder to implement, so before using it, you should ensure that the framework aligns with your site goals.
The main goal of making your website mobile friendly is to ensure that your website scales to fit the screen of any mobile device. The above techniques can help with the layout, content size, and width when transitioning from desktop to mobile.
To ensure that your website is mobile friendly, pick up your mobile device and ask yourself the following questions:
If you mostly answered “no,” then it’s time to make your website mobile friendly. Contact us so we can help optimize your site for mobile devices and capture the traffic and sales you’ve been missing!