Mobile-Friendly Websites: Optional or Essential?

By Bevan Moller

If you are using Social Media marketing for your business but you don’t have a mobile friendly website, you are losing customers.

So is a mobile-friendly site an essential today, or just a nice idea? Your customers aren’t looking you up on their phones anyway, are they?

According to Facebook, over 80% of their daily active users are on mobile devices. So if your customers find you on Facebook and click through to your website, there’s a very good chance they are viewing your website on their phone.

What are the stats for your website? How do you even check that?

Hopefully, your web developer has set up Google Analytics for your website (if they don’t – ask them to). In Google Analytics, look in the left column under “Audience” and click “Mobile”. This will show you stats about website visitors using desktop computers, mobile phones, and tablet devices so you can compare between the three.

Our clients are typically seeing over 15% of overall traffic to their sites from mobile devices with some clients seeing up to 40%!

So what’s the big deal though, a website’s a website right? How can it be “mobile friendly”?

In essence, a website is “mobile friendly” if it presents content on a mobile device in a way that is easily readable, and with buttons that can easily be clicked.

If your website is not mobile friendly, you’ll see the full-size website (intended for a large, wide desktop screen) shrunk down to fit on the small screen of a mobile phone, which is usually tall and narrow.

The user has to zoom in so the text is big enough to read, but then they can only read small chunks at a time before they need to scroll this way and that to see everything. Often links and buttons are awkward to click as well, because they are too tiny to touch with a finger accurately.

If your website isn’t mobile friendly, the whole experience for a mobile user is much more difficult than it needs to be. Many users will just give up, go back to a Google search, and try another business.

As you would expect, Google is very much aware of this and plans to prioritise mobile-friendly websites in the search results. Yes, that means that Google will give your website a better ranking for mobile searching if your website is mobile friendly. Obviously, this also means that if your website isn’t mobile friendly you’ll likely drop off the top rankings for mobile users.

There are plenty of websites (including large companies) that aren’t mobile friendly, so there’s also an opportunity for you to get ahead of the competition. You may even climb the rankings in Google for mobile searches above your competitors that aren’t mobile ready.