The Importance of a Mobile-Friendly Website

You understand the importance of a strong online presence to the success of your business. That’s why you have invested time and money in a strong content marketing strategy that incorporates search engine optimization. If you’ve noticed that, despite efforts such as these, your pages are not generating the rankings and traffic that they should, it may be that your website is not mobile-friendly. Fortunately, a website design company Waterloo specialist may be able to help redesign your site for better compatibility.

What Is a Mobile-Friendly Website?

A mobile-friendly website has been modified for better display and functionality on a device with a smaller screen. Compare your desktop monitor to your smartphone screen, and you’ll notice some significant differences between the two. Not only is your monitor screen larger, but it is also wider. While you can turn your smartphone to display in landscape view, many people using their smartphones to use the internet do not. Therefore, a website that is not optimized for mobile devices does not fit well on a smartphone screen. The text may be too tiny to read, or the consumer may have to do a lot of swiping, pinching, and zooming to see all the content.

Why Is a Mobile-Friendly Website Important?

It hasn’t even been 15 years since Apple introduced the first smartphone, but since that time, the devices have become an indispensable part of many people’s lives. A majority of Canadians — 85% — own a smartphone, and since 2014, more people worldwide use mobile devices to access the internet than a desktop computer. The average user spends nearly 2 1/2 hours out of every day interacting with his or her smartphone. Tracked individually, the total number of smartphone engagements averages about 200 per day.

All of this means that your customer base is far more likely to engage with your website on a mobile device than on a desktop computer. Having a mobile-friendly website allows you to meet consumers where they are.

How Is It Detrimental if Your Website Is Not Mobile-Friendly?

Since most of your customers are probably going to access your website with a smartphone or tablet, their user experience is likely to be frustrating if your website is not mobile-friendly. If customers cannot read your website or find what they are looking for easily, they are unlikely to linger on it for very long. As a result, you may see high bounce rates for a website that is not mobile-friendly. In other words, people may visit but do not linger on your site for very long. A mobile-friendly site that is easy to search, navigate, and read encourages smartphone and tablet users to stay longer and look around at all you have to offer.

It may be that having a website that is not mobile-friendly prevents customers from finding your site in the first place. Since at least 2016, Google has used mobile-friendliness as a factor for ranking sites in web searches, and in 2018, it became a minimum requirement due to mobile-first indexing. Because of these changes, you may not be making it onto the first page of search results if your website isn’t mobile-friendly. Since a majority of people performing web searches do not look past the first page of results, your website may as well be invisible if it isn’t ranking.

How Can a Website Design Company Waterloo Help You?

It is important to note that a website that has been resized to fit on a smartphone screen isn’t necessarily mobile-friendly. A truly mobile-friendly website provides the user with an optimum experience through elements designed with their habits in mind. A cookie-cutter solution won’t do. That’s why Unwired Web Solutions works with you to create a custom experience geared toward your targeted demographic. Find out more about our design process for mobile development.