Sometimes, it’s tough to imagine (or remember) life without smartphones, and honestly—who would want to?
A shrinking number of the global population, as it turns out. There are an estimated 4.88 billion smartphone users worldwide, which is 635 million more than there were in 2023.
Clearly, it is critical for your brand to have a mobile-friendly website. In fact, websites that are not optimized for mobile miss out on a whopping 63% of US Google traffic. Let’s not let that happen to you.
Keep reading to explore the most essential aspects of mobile friendliness, why it’s important, and how you can test your website to ensure it is mobile optimized.
Have you ever opened a website on your phone, only to angrily tap the screen about 100 times before it loads? We’ve all been there. That site is not mobile-friendly.
A mobile-friendly website is a website that is designed to run smoothly on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. Outside of processing power—especially for “older” phones—the biggest difference is screen size. Everything you see on a computer screen needs to be responsive to a wide array of mobile device screen sizes.
Besides sparing your phone screen from rage clicks, why is all this important?
As we’ve established, mobile-friendly websites are the new normal. Responsive web design has made mobile optimization more straightforward and accessible to everyone—which is great! The slight downside? Users now have extremely high expectations of your site’s speed and functionality on mobile devices.
If your website takes too long to load, or isn’t easy to use, your customer traffic and conversions will drop like flies. On the other hand, having a mobile-optimized website brings with it several key business advantages, which include our three reasons mobile-friendly websites are important: improved visibility, user experience, and lead generation!
It’s no secret that Google prioritizes mobile devices, or that mobile phones are an important ranking signal. Google dropped its first mobile-focused update in 2016.
Fast forward to today, and Google’s Helpful Content Update has deepened Google’s connection to all things mobile. The update announced that Google would be prioritizing user experience.
In terms of mobile devices, this means that having a well-designed and technically-sound website is more important than ever, especially if you want to improve your mobile SEO performance.
What does it all mean? Mobile friendliness equals enhanced search visibility.
UX is so important that it needs to be emphasized twice.
Users will leave your website if it doesn’t load quickly or is too complicated to use on their phone. In general, the average bounce rate for mobile is 52.1%, meaning over half of your mobile visitors will leave your website without interacting with it. Ensuring your website is as mobile-friendly as possible just gives you a fighting chance.
To increase your site’s mobile friendliness, you can:
You can also improve your UX and accessibility by boosting the technical health and page speed across your website.
Happy users are more likely to turn into happy customers.
Consumers in every industry want to get what they’re looking for quickly, especially when they use the quickest resource available to them in their purse or pocket—their smartphone. If you’re not optimized for mobile, you can’t offer your customers immediate service. That means you lose out on potential leads or sales.
Users have clearly defined expectations and directions based on whatever device they are using to browse your website. If their expectations are not met, users are likely to get frustrated and take their business to a competitor’s site.
Look at key indicators of how users interact with your site by reviewing some of these website metrics:
We don’t have a crystal ball, but one thing is for certain: the importance of mobile websites will only continue to grow. The technology at our fingertips is rapidly evolving, and your business needs to do the same.
Some SEOs have worried about mobile-friendly sites, concerned that changes to Google’s Search Console would make it a less important ranking factor. However, that is not the case. Google has stated:
“December 1, 2023, we’ll be retiring Search Console’s “Mobile Usability” report, the Mobile-Friendly Test tool and Mobile-Friendly Test API. This doesn’t mean that mobile usability isn’t important for success with Google Search. It remains critical for users, who are using mobile devices more than ever, and as such, it remains a part of our page experience guidance.”
The update is simply that: an update to a more advanced system. Google is relying on new tools and metrics outside of Search Console, such as Lighthouse from Chrome—an open-source, automated tool for gaining valuable insights into the quality of web core vitals of a page.
In other words, Google understood the need to update how they rank mobile-friendly websites to keep up with the new technology on the market. The trend of evolving and updating systems will likely continue for decades to come.
Testing your website for mobile friendliness is easy. Pull out your phone or tablet and search for your website. See how it loads, how it functions, if it’s easy to read, and simple to use. Another option is Google Chromes Lighthouse insights. If you want to get more technical, which we recommend, you can try using GTMetrix, a page speed tool with Lighthouse integration.
If you want help assessing your site’s mobile friendliness or fixing any issues you find, let our experts do the heavy lifting for you. Contact us and we’ll get your mobile website up and running smoothly for your customers to enjoy.
