Unless You Hate Making Money, You Can’t Skip Mobile Optimization
You can’t skip mobile-friendly features if you want your business website to succeed. Mobile users aren’t a minority, and they haven’t been for a long time. Over 60% of all the traffic online is from mobile devices. People used to turn to their mobile phones for little more than personal communication and maybe a few games, but now things are different. Phones function as tiny personal computers. People rely on them for serious matters like banking, medical communication, and important purchases. Considering the convenience of phones and the broad array of things you can do with them, most people simply don’t see any reason to switch to desktop to shop. Mobile users have high expectations, too. They want mobile shopping to be as fast and easy as technical possibilities allow. That’s one reason businesses with sites that work seamlessly on mobile get more customers than those with sites that are clunky at best on phones. Users determine which category your site falls into within seconds.
Smart Strategies That Get Results
When we say that visitors form their opinion of a site’s mobile friendliness within seconds, we mean it. You have three seconds to make a good impression before a typical visitor gives up and leaves your site. Though a little more patience from people would be nice, it’s not on the menu, and visitor expectations only get higher as technology improves. What does optimizing websites for mobile mean for you, though? It includes all the following and more:
- Page speed: As stated above, you’ve got a maximum of three seconds, and web surfers think even that is pushing it.
- Easy navigation: It should be easy for users to tap links, explore menus, and fill out forms on small touch screens.
- Readability: The content on your page should scale for mobile. Text must be large enough to read, and it must never trail past the edge of the screen. Ideally, text should also be responsive, with sentences and paragraphs changing shape when people zoom in and out.
- Simple forms: Simplify complex forms, and then simplify them some more. Many users bounce the moment they’re asked to fill out a complex form. Simple forms allow you to get someone closer to conversion before asking them to spend time sharing more information.
Responsive Web Design Is Critical
Business owners who’ve given their all to website optimization don’t have to deal with losing around 40% of possible customers within seconds, which means they make more money. They also have a huge advantage in local search since many people search for businesses at the last minute while they’re out and about. Attractive mobile design enhances your company’s professional reputation, whereas poor mobile design makes it look like a business isn’t serious about what it does. Sites that are easy to navigate on mobile create a smooth process that carries visitors from their moment of arrival to their first purchase. Some mobile sites are so bad that making a purchase is a real feat of persistence and effort. If you’re lucky, perhaps your competitors offer that kind of mobile experience!
Search Engines Love Mobile-Friendly Sites
Mobile-friendly websites are about more than the visitor experience. Search engines are highly critical of sites with poor mobile functionality, and they penalize them heavily. There is little you can do to mess up your SEO efforts more than ignoring website mobile usability. How do search engines assess mobile functionality, though? They look at important information like bounce rates, time on site, and other engagement metrics. Their crawlers also make note of things like image loading speed. On the bright side, you might outrank otherwise formidable competitors if your site works better on mobile. You can improve your site’s mobile friendliness by yourself, but it’s also smart to consider selecting a reliable web marketing company to do it for you. That way, you can focus on the complex things that only you are equipped to handle.
