Via mobile is everyone’s go-to way to surf the internet these days. Whether they’re looking for new products and services or looking for cooking recipes, everyone finds it more convenient to use their mobile devices than booting up a computer.
There are an incredible 7.33 billion mobile phone users in the world, and of this number, there are 4.32 billion mobile internet users. This just goes to show that the market for attracting people to your website via mobile is massive.
Simply having a website, however, doesn’t automatically mean that it’ll work well on a mobile platform—the website needs to be optimised to work that way.
If your website isn’t correctly optimised for mobile, chances are that you’ll start seeing a drop in traffic coming into your website. Poor or non-existent mobile optimisation is one of the main reasons people lose interest in a website and move on.
In this blog post, we’ll take a deep dive into the importance of mobile optimisation for your website.
1. Helps build trust
Gaining trust is one of the most important steps in attracting your target demographic or keeping website visitors you’ve won over coming back for more.
One way people gauge the trustworthiness of a brand is through the accessibility of their website and having a mobile-friendly website is a great way to build trust with your visitors in the long run.
When your website is mobile-friendly, your visitors can access the content they want, make purchases more easily, and get help from your staff when they need it.
2. Makes your website more convenient
Convenience is one of the biggest selling points for any website. If your website is user-friendly and perfectly tailored to meet the needs of your target audience, people will be more likely to stay on your website or revisit it in the future.
Since most people use smartphones for their online activities, a website that’s optimised for mobile use will allow website visitors and customers to make purchases faster, read website content in a font size that suits their phones, and take action by simply pressing a button.
3. Speeds up your website
Traditional desktop websites have large graphics and other heavy assets—these can take a while to load, especially on smaller, less powerful mobile devices.
Most mobile device users also use the internet while on the move and this may prompt them to use mobile internet, which isn’t as fast as a fibre or broadband connection. Due to this, unoptimised websites may take much longer to load.
It doesn’t matter how eye-catching your website is or how good the content is if it takes too long to load on a mobile device. Knowing this, your website should be perfectly optimised to work on low internet speeds and the website graphics need to be small enough to load quickly.
4. Improves the mobile shopping experience
If your website is used primarily for selling your products, mobile optimisation is a must. 81.5% of people search for products and services online and 76.8% of shoppers purchase products online.
Naturally, many people shopping online use mobile devices to make purchases. So by making your website mobile-friendly, you can help potential customers make their purchases much more easily, and this may help increase sales in the long run.
5. Allows it to be favoured by Google
Believe it or not, Google’s algorithm prioritises websites that are optimised for mobile. Google is well aware that most people on the internet use mobile devices, so they want search engines to give results that meet their needs.
By making your website mobile-friendly in both content and formatting, SEO for your website will be much better and you can expect to see good search engine rankings on Google.
Test your website for mobile responsiveness
Just making changes to your website to optimise it for mobile isn’t enough—you’ll need to test out its mobile responsiveness too.
A very easy way to do this is to use the Google Search Console’s Mobile-Friendly Test. All you need to do is enter the URLs of web pages on your website, and the tool will do the rest. The test will give you several statuses, such as:
The page is not usable on mobile: This means that the web page has multiple issues on mobile that make it unsuitable for the platform.
The page is usable on mobile: This assures you that your web page is properly optimised for mobile, with little to no technical issues.
Another great way to check mobile responsiveness is to use Chrome DevTools. Just open your website on Google Chrome and do the following:
- Right-click anywhere on the page and click “Inspect”
- Click on the “Toggle Device Toolbar”
- Choose “Responsive”
After doing this, if your website shrinks to fit mobile devices, it is mobile-friendly.
Give your website the mobile treatment
Regardless of the purpose of your website, it won’t offer the results you’re hoping for unless it’s properly optimised for mobile devices. Mobile optimisation has become a standard today and this is unlikely to change anytime soon.
Give your website a mobile upgrade if you haven’t already and watch how your traffic and conversion improve than ever before!