Mobile Friendly Websites Part 1: Are Your Clients Websites Mobile Friendly and Why Does It Matter?

We would like to address mobile friendly websites in two parts.

• This week we will give an overview on how to tell if your client’s site is mobile friendly.
• Next week we will address how to make your client’s site mobile-friendly in more detail.

Why Stellar Websites for Mobile Devices Are So Important

Here are some things you must know about mobile before we continue:

• Most web traffic is from mobile devices. Last year, about 57% of online traffic was from mobile phones.
• About 58% of Google searches are done on mobile devices.
• Almost 73% of Internet users will access the internet exclusively from mobile devices by the year 2025. That’s about 3.7 billion people, ¾ of the Internet users in the world.

If that isn’t enough, if you are not already aware, these days Google predominantly uses the mobile version of websites to rank them in search results. Google is not indexing desktop only sites for ranking at all now. In other words, if you are not optimizing your clients’ sites for mobile devices, you are handing them to their competition on a silver platter.

A Mobile Friendly Site Enables Your Client’s Customers to Become Evangelists

A key advantage to well done mobile sites that many business owners underestimate is their support of sharing to social media. Some social media platforms, such as Instagram and TikTok are for all intents and purposes only used on social media. And the others such as Facebook and Twitter still have a strong mobile bent.

Your client’s customers can easily share website content to any social media platform from their smartphones and tablets. It only takes a click. These kinds of shared posts serve as testimonials to others.

Users Constantly Switch Among Devices

People routinely switch out devices they use. Your client’s website must work well on all devices if they expect to get and keep business.

Now, naturally, Google wants to send its users to helpful, informative websites. If users find it difficult to use your client’s mobile website, be assured that website is not going to rank in Google search. Google will feature mobile friendly sites instead.

Also bear in mind that a customer’s journey may involve more than one device. For example, Emmie decides it’s time to upgrade her laptop. She might use her laptop to find stores near her that sell laptops, because she does not want to order online sight unseen. Once she is at the store, she finds a couple that seem like good possibilities, so she Googles reviews for each on her smartphone. She decides she doesn’t have enough information, so she snaps photos of the model numbers and emails them to herself. Once back home again, she uses her tablet to do a live chat with the manufacturer’s customer service to ask some questions about specs Finally, from her desktop computer, she orders one of the laptops from the ecommerce site of the brick and mortar store she visited.

What Kind of Mobile Devices Are We Talking About?

People often refer to tablets and any kind of phone that can access the Internet as “mobile devices.”  But in reality, there are differences.

Mobile Smart Phones

Mobile smart phones could be iPhones, Android or even Windows phones. But what they have in common is

• They can access the Internet through browsers
• They have very limited screen space
• Unlike desktops and laptops, they are oriented vertically rather than horizontally.

Tablets

Tablets are certainly a lot more portable than desktops or laptops, but there are key differences between mobile phones and tablets. Tablets have a lot more space than mobile phones. Some businesses optimize their websites specifically for tablets. If they don’t, websites generally appear much more like they would on a desktop than a mobile phone.

Other Types of Phones

There are other types of phones that access the Internet, but with different types of technology. These include phones that can support HTML5 markup but don’t support all the extension APIs and functionality. Other phones cannot display websites through standard HTML but only through cHTML (used for small devices) or alternative technologies.

Two Key Goals for Mobile Friendly Websites

Help Get Customers Where They Want to Go

Web developers have a whole lot less space to work with on mobile screens than desktops or laptops. If you don’t make provision for that when designing for mobile devices, it will be impossible for the user to see what they need to including navigation.

Without compensating for size, some images can be so small they are meaningless, part of the navigation is not visible or does not seem to appear in logical order, and text can appear a jumble.

Generally speaking, the navigation method needs to change completely for mobile, often to the hamburger menu mentioned earlier.

Enable Quick Access to Information

Let’s face it, customers are fickle. If they have to search through your site for what they can easily find on a competitor’s site, guess which one they will use?

In addition to designing pages specifically for mobile devices so they can be easily read and followed, look for other ways to keep your users informed. One way is to equip both your mobile website and your desktop website with a AI Chatbots so confused (or just interested) customers can get the answers they want any time of the day or night.

Need Help Developing Websites that Work Well Across All Devices?

Marketing is so complex and technical these days, that one person or a small agency can’t do it all on their own. But you want to give your clients what they need instead of sending them off to your competition. That includes developing mobile friendly websites.

Consider white label web development services from the experts at Umbrella. We can be your right hand in serving your clients.

Contact us for a free consultation to discuss developing websites for your clients that work seamlessly from desktop to tablet to smartphone.