IMPORTANCE OF MOBILE DESIGN
Is your website optimized for mobile devices?
If not, your website could be costing you customers!
Here’s why — About 60% of organic search engine visits occur on mobile devices in the U.S, and 55.4% of internet users use their cell phones to buy online.
Then there’s Google — back in September of 2020, Google made a full shift to mobile-first indexing. This means that the search engine predominantly uses the mobile version of a website, crawled using its smartphone agent, for indexing and ranking a website.
So even if you’ve got a website that looks mind-blowing on a laptop or desktop PC and has been designed around a best in class user experience, if that same website doesn’t match up when viewed on a mobile device, you could find your search engine rankings suffer as a result.
In fact, 80% of the top ranked websites are optimized for mobile users showing that Google does give preference to mobile-friendly sites.
So if your site isn’t optimized for mobile, you could be missing out on serious business.
What’s the difference between a mobile-friendly site and mobile-optimized site? A mobile-friendly site accurately displays on smaller screens. It may not be perfect, but it’s generally functional and is a close replica of the larger, desktop version.
A mobile-optimized site goes a step further. It reformats itself specifically for mobile devices. It simplifies navigation and layout to make it easier to read and use. It reformats content, displays larger navigation buttons, and optimizes images for the screen size and network limitations. This results in improved user experience and web speeds, increased user engagement and time spent on the site, and better search engine rankings.
Does it really make a difference? Consider this: According to Deloitte, reducing the speed of your mobile site by just 0.1 seconds results in a bounce rate improvement of 8%. Now, we all know that the longer the load time, the more likely users are to leave a page without interacting with it. But one-tenth of a second is all it takes to hold some users on the page. Imagine if you improved things by one whole second, or even several seconds. Does that sound worth it? That is the kind of thing mobile-optimized sites can do.
In this day and age, website design should start with a mobile-first approach. Here at RB Collaborative, we design websites exclusive using Squarespace. This platform allows us to design a website while comparing the mobile and desktop versions simultaneously to ensure seamless optimization of both formats.
If you’re one of the many businesses that have not improved the mobile experience of your website, now is the time to upgrade and level up. Fill out our contact form to get started.
