Importance Of Mobile Website Design for Your Website Traffic

Part of our working week is auditing current websites of potential clients. This involves reporting on how it views on different systems, as well as the business’ entire internet branding and activity. We find a range of websites, from no mobile friendly through to poor implementation of a responsive design. Going mobile isn’t always done the optimal way. With mobile web traffic growing at a rate of 78% per annum, its time to take your mobile website optimization seriously. Here’s some food for thought to help you get to grips with your mobile web design approach.

Who are you aiming for?

Who is the person you want to buy your product or service? Create an imaginary persona if need be (age, background, experiences, schooling, job role, etc) to let you bring to life that perfect client. Although it’s a no-brainer more and more people are using mobile devices every year (mobile and tablet), some organizations have more to gain by embracing this type of web visitor.

Start with the following:

1. How many visitors are desktop? How many are using a smart phone ? Do not forget that a tablet is counted as a mobile device
2. Have you been seeing different trends per device? For instance, are mobile users more inclined to use the contact form? Are tablet users viewing more pages overall?
3. What are the core needs of people coming to your site? Are there any different use cases?

These questions should get you moving in the right direction. Knowing how much traffic, leads and revenue is going down the plug hole due to a poor or non-existent mobile website is a great catalyst for making the right changes.

Once it’s been decided to optimize for mobile, I often get the following queries.

How much does a mobile website cost?

You’re sold on the need for getting a better user experience for your mobile visitors – the stats show clearly just how much is being lost by not taking action. So you begin browsing around for a mobile website design option that suits your needs and budget.

Do I need an app?

We often get a request right from the start that the client wants an app, period. It might not be the best solution for their needs, or even their budget. But someone in the business, normally high up, has heard that apps are super cool so they’ve just gotta have one. However, it should almost never be the first step in any marketing plan or mobile strategy and there are lots of reasons for that.

It can be expensive to build, challenging to update, and it requires downloading to use it. This means its harder to generate organic interest and market the app.  There are benefits to building a native app, but nine out of ten times, developing a native app is not the first task in going mobile and should be a long-term goal for your brand.

What exactly are the advantages of responsive web design?

Strip away the trendiness and all the hype around responsive web design, and what are the benefits? Straight up, you get one website with one coding set and CMS, and that website stretches and fits to any screen size in the best way possible. This makes your website visitors (and potential future clients) much happier, providing an enjoyable and user friendly experience on the device of their choice. Happy mobile users normally spend longer on your website and don’t bounce off as much. These stats are tracked by Google, so can positively influence your SEO and search engine rankings.

Going mobile the right way is simple. Plan for the future and create one seamless experience for all devices. Don’t try to transform your desktop site to mobile, or develop a totally separate mobile website. Building a responsive website to optimize for mobile traffic is the right investment.

Responsive, Responsive, Responsive

Stop thinking mobile website design and begin thinking responsive. Take mobile and tablet users seriously, because its going to impact your business one way or another. It already is.