Depending on the size and structure, conversions can be quite difficult, leaving some webmasters asking if it’s even worth it.
Converting a traditional website into a mobile-friendly site isn’t always easy.
Well, the short answer to this question is yes, making your website compatible with mobile devices is worth the investment of your time and resources — and here’s why.
Mobile Internet Usages Surpasses Desktop
More people now access the Internet on smartphones and other mobile devices than desktop computers.
Granted, some people continue to use desktop computers to access their favorite websites, but mobile has taken over as the preferred platform for this purpose.
Industry experts predict that more and more users will switch from desktop computers to mobile devices. Webmasters who fail to provide a mobile-friendly design to their visitors will suffer from a loss of traffic.
After all, more than half of all Internet traffic comes from mobile devices.
Bing Tags Mobile-Friendly Listings
The next time you perform a Bing search using your smartphone or tablet, look at the listings.
Bing automatically adds this tag to inform users whether or not a site is mobile friendly. If a website has a design that’s compatible with both desktop and mobile devices, it will display this tag.
Not surprisingly, websites listed with Bing’s mobile-friendly tag typically receive more clicks.
From a business owner’s perspective, these clicks may yield leads, sales and other conversions, helping the business grow and develop.
Of course, you’ll need to design your website using a mobile-friendly configuration to receive this tag.
Mobile-Friendly Websites and SEO
This alone should be reason enough to embrace a mobile-friendly web design. Google, Bing and other search engines use mobile compatibility as a ranking factor for their respective algorithms.
If your website is mobile friendly, it’s more likely to rank higher in the search results for its target keywords.
While Google has used mobile compatibility as a ranking signal for a while now, it announced back in 2015 that it was “expanding” this metric as a ranking signal.
Trust and Confidence
There’s also the issue of trust and confidence associated with mobile-friendly websites. But if your website isn’t mobile friendly and the user accesses it on a mobile device they will likely encounter broken elements.
In turn, this hurts your site’s trust and confidence, leaving visitors to question your business model. You can instill a higher level of trust and confidence in your site’s visitors, however, by making sure it has a mobile-friendly design.
Different Options
There are actually several different ways to create a mobile-friendly website, one of which is to use a different domain name.
You can set up your primary website as a dot com and your mobile-friendly website as a dot mobi.
Although easy to set up, this isn’t the best option. Using two domains may create conflicts regarding duplicate content.
Furthermore, anytime you need to update your site you’ll have to do it twice. The recommended configuration for mobile-friendly web design is the use of a Responsive Web Design (RWD).
Responsive websites automatically adjust to fit the user’s browsers. This means your website will look the same, whether it’s viewed on a desktop computer, laptop, tablet or smartphone.
Checking Your Site’s Mobile Compatibility
Now that you know a little bit about the importance of using a mobile-friendly design, you might be wondering how to check and see if your site is compatible with mobile devices.
One way is to manually access and view your site on a smartphone, in which case you can see exactly how it looks when viewed on a mobile device.
The problem with this method, however, is that not all mobile devices are the same. So even if your site looks fine when viewed on an iPhone 6, perhaps it contains broken elements when viewed on a Samsung Galaxy Note 5.
An easier and more effective way to check your site’s mobile compatibility is to run the URL through Google’s free testing tool at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/.
What are your thoughts on mobile-friendly web design? Contact us today. We’d love to hear from you.
