Should your website be mobile friendly?

Does your website only look good on specific screen sizes? Do you want your images and text to scale with the size of the screen looking at them? Do people visit your website on their phones? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you need a mobile-friendly website.

Having a mobile-friendly website is one of the most important things you can do for the discoverability of your website online. In this article, we will go over all the reasons you should have a mobile-friendly website and the advantages that come with it.

What Does Mobile-Friendly Website Mean?

A mobile-friendly website is a website that can change its look and asset sizes based on the size of the screen that is accessing it. The ‘mobile’ in mobile-friendly refers to mobile devices like smartphones, tablets, and handheld smart-devices.

Another term for mobile-friendly is ‘responsive website design’. When creating a website, mobile-friendliness is one of the most important things to keep in mind, or for you to ask your web developer about. A mobile-friendly website creates a better user experience and will be rewarded by search engines like Google.

How Many People Visit Your Website From Mobile Devices

Recent studies have shown that over half of all internet search traffic is done from a mobile device. As smartphones become cheaper and more accessible, the number of people using them to search for information increases. Each year, desktop computer search numbers decline while mobile internet traffic rises. Not creating a mobile-friendly website is a big mistake that many companies make when they begin to push their advertising efforts online.

Mobile-Friendly User Experience

At the beginning of the article, we touched on how your website’s design assets can affect the user’s experience. Creating a positive user experience on your website can lead to more sales, longer time on your website, more time browsing products, signups to an email list, return customers, and create a positive impression on first-time visitors.

These are just some of the advantages that a mobile-friendly website can provide for your user’s experience. There are many more benefits to having a mobile-friendly website related to cost of maintenance, SEO rank, and user trust.

While waiting for something to happen, traveling, or doing everyday tasks, many people have their phones in their hands, scrolling through social media, playing a game, or doing research. The time they use their phones can be long and last for hours or brief and last just a few seconds. If the user visits your website during this time, they shouldn’t have to pinch the screen or swipe to see all the information on a page.

A big difference between mobile searches compared to desktop searches is the number of time users will typically spend on 1 page. It’s in the name, mobile. Mobile users are typically doing something else or going somewhere and have a much shorter attention span compared to someone sitting at a desk reading through an article looking for specific information.

What Makes A Website Mobile Friendly

Mobile-friendly website design goes beyond just resizing text and images, it also includes things like creating a whole different version of a page to appear on smaller screen sizes, optimizing image and script files to be as small as possible to be easier on mobile data, and mobile processors. Something important to know about mobile-friendly design is that no matter what size screen people are using to visit your website, the experience and theme should be the same.

Here are a few things to keep in mind when designing a mobile-friendly website

• All visual assets scale with the screen size
• A maximum of 2 columns should appear on smaller screen sizes
• Image and script files should be optimized for web
• Website visitors shouldn’t have to zoom in to read text on your website

Keeping these things in mind when creating a mobile-friendly website will help create a fantastic user experience that will be more effective at converting visitors into leads.

How Does A Mobile-Friendly Website Affect SEO and Search Rankings

As of 2015, Google had announced that mobile-friendly website design is the most important ranking factor in the Google search algorithm. Before this, it was speculated that mobile-friendly website design was weighted highly, and their post in 2015 has now confirmed it. Seven years later, in 2022, mobile-friendly website design is still one of the most important ranking factors in the organic search algorithm.

In addition to their announcement of the importance of a mobile-friendly website regarding search rankings, they also created the page speed insights tool the following year that evaluates the website’s mobile-friendliness and assigns a score out of 100. Websites with a high mobile score tend to rank higher in search results.

If you optimize an old non-mobile-friendly website for SEO and have no plans to redesign the website into a mobile-friendly version, you will be wasting money and time on any SEO efforts. If you are paying for ads to an eCommerce store, not being mobile-friendly or responsive can waste money per ad click. If a mobile user visits your website looking to buy a product but has a frustrating user experience, they likely won’t trust the website and leave. A worse user experience can also hurt your organic search ranking position by giving search engines like Google signals that your website isn’t satisfying user searches.

If your website is not mobile-friendly, it isn’t too late to begin designing a new mobile-friendly website. There are dozens of tools, SEO tools, and tutorials available to help you through the design process. Check out other articles on our blog to learn more about responsive, mobile-friendly website design and other aspects of online marketing. If you are looking for a company to build you a mobile-friendly website for your business, get in touch with us today!

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