Importance of being mobile friendly

Get Mobile Friendly Now

As a small business owner, you know the importance of keeping up with trends and paying attention to your target market. With so much competition out there, it is easy to lag behind and do damage to your bottom line. One often overlooked aspect of maintaining your brand and image is creating a mobile friendly site. The cost of converting your old desktop-browser-only website to a mobile-friendly one is worth the investment.

Consumers love consistency. If they have an experience that is dependable and steady no matter what screen they are looking at, they are more likely to form a positive image of your brand.

Here are some statistics for how consumers are using the internet:

• PC/Laptop – 91%
• Smartphone – 80%
• Tablet – 47%
• Games Console – 37%

(source: globalwebindex.net/blog/80-of-internet-users-own-a-smartphone)

This data is telling us that a majority of internet users are potentially accessing your page from a smartphone. We know from other data that the number of global users for smartphones has surpassed the number of desktop users! (source: https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/21/majority-of-digital-media-consumption-now-takes-place-in-mobile-apps/) With the limited screen real estate of a mobile device, it is important that your site shows up correctly and is optimized for mobile phone use. Have you ever been to a site on your smartphone where the text an images are shoved together awkwardly? It is never a good experience.

As an equally important side note, did you know that google ranks pages based on their mobile-friendliness? (source: https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/6196932?hl=en) If your site is not viewable correctly on mobile devices, that means your page rank will be dropping. In short: get mobile friendly or risk losing site traffic and business!

Fortunately, for those not blessed with technical knowledge, there are plenty of companies out there that will help you improve your website. Making a site mobile friendly is also a good chance to re-work your brand if you feel that you need an update to your image.

There are a few ways to go about re-working your website:

• Remake or redo the website completely to be mobile friendly. This means that your site has one code base, and that code will produce a great site no matter what size of screen is being used.
• Keep your old site, but direct to a new mobile friendly site when your server detects that a mobile device is being used.

Web developing has come a long way since its early days, and there are many CSS code libraries that make it relatively easy to build a mobile friendly website. If coding by yourself sounds intimidating, get some help from a reputable company!

There are some even some companies out there that tout a painless, automatic conversion of your old site with a few adjustments that you can even choose to make yourself.

Whatever way you choose to go about it, get going on making your site mobile friendly sooner than later. Your bottom line will thank you for it.