Having a responsive website simply means that your site is mobile-friendly. This gives you confidence that whether someone is browsing your site through an iPhone, tablet or any android device, it will automatically scale to fit different sized screens. This ensures a user-friendly experience rather than a frustrating one, and is therefore more likely to generate more leads and a lower bounce rate.
Why do you need a mobile-friendly website?
The majority of any business’ customers are going to be devoted to their mobile phone. It’s inevitable due to the digital lives we all run. On average, us Brits can’t go longer than 12 minutes without checking our phones!
Research shows that the majority of users on Facebook log on an average of seven times a day, and check WhatsApp a whopping 74 times. Now that says it all. Mobile phone usage across the UK is extreme and it’s abundantly clear that if businesses want to generate more leads whilst holding on to current customers, they need their website to be mobile-friendly.
Google changes its ranking algorithms
Once mobile usage became more popular than laptops\desktops, Google’s algorithms changed. Mobile phones quickly became the most popular device for getting online in 2015. Therefore, Google had to change the way that it displayed mobile search results. Prioritising mobile-friendly sites, it meant that all of a sudden, websites that were optimised for mobile started to rank better than those that weren’t.
Years on from then, Google continues to favour this trend. In July 2018, it started to make the move towards swapping out its entire index to a mobile-first orientation. This means that from here onwards, Google will judge your desktop and mobile sites’ worthiness based on your mobile implementation. In today’s digital world, we often do what Google recommends. This means ensuring your website is responsive and mobile-friendly.
It builds credibility
There are many benefits to a mobile-friendly website; they can help to build credibility with customers, clients and relevant influencers. It ensures that anyone who visits your site will have a professional and user-friendly experience. This encourages them to see you as a credible resource for information, products and/or services – not just online, but offline as well. This also means they are more likely to get in touch.
A reputation takes time and effort to build up. Why risk all that hard work by having a poor website.
Even if you offer some of the most useful and valuable products or services on the market, if your website’s mobile experience is poor or non-existent, people will go elsewhere and you will see this through a high bounce rate. Visitors have taken one look and left the site immediately.
You can reach more customers, faster
Making your website mobile-friendly automatically opens up your audience to anyone browsing on a phone.
When using a responsive design, your website will automatically render to look good and function as its designed to, no matter what. This allows visitors to read your blogs, purchase your products/services or contact you at the click of a button without any obstacles.
Websites that aren’t mobile-friendly however, often require the user to have to zoom in order to read the content. Most of us find this frustrating and isn’t a great user experience. Having to do this is likely to lead the visitor to abandon the site. Many businesses can’t afford to give customers a bad experience – digital or otherwise.
Now we’ve been through some of the benefits of having a mobile-friendly website, lets discuss how you can create one.
How to create a mobile-friendly website?
The first thing you’ll need to do is check whether or not your website is responsive to a mobile phone. You can do this by simply looking at it on various mobile devices, or you can use a FREE tool called mobiReady. This tests your site’s performance across different devices.
There are two options if you require a website redesign. You can either design a mobile-friendly website yourself or you can get in such with an expert. Sometimes it can be useful to get in touch with whoever built your website in the first place. When building the site yourself, you may need some help making it mobile-friendly. We recommend doing an online search for companies or specialists in web design.
If you’d like help or any advice with designing and creating a mobile-friendly website, get in touch with the onefoursix team on 01604 419776.
