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We live in a world where incessant technological developments challenge access to information.
This relentless hunger for newer advancements has taken the world of internet and website development by a storm.
With the advent of mobile technology, people have shown to bend towards using devices like smartphones, tablets, and laptops.
It wouldn’t be wrong to say that mobile technology has become ingrained into our daily lives.
According to the Meeker 2018 Internet Trends Report, the time spent on mobile engaging by an average user has sprung to 3.3 hours a day!
Therefore, it becomes a huge responsibility for website developers to create websites that can be accessible from any mobile device.
And that’s where the role of a mobile friendly website kicks in.
A mobile friendly website ensures that an instant access to the desired information is provided to the user regardless of his location and device in use.
Therefore, it’s important for us to understand what exactly is a mobile friendly website and top reasons why a mobile friendly website is a necessity.
So, without any further ado, let’s dive in!
What is a Mobile Responsive website?
A mobile friendly website is a website designed and developed to display content on any device, regardless of the size of a particular device.
The website is optimized for mobile devices as doing this makes it far easier for users to consume content and navigate on a mobile phone, tablet or laptop.
In other words, a mobile website adjusts to the size of the screen and fit in the resolution of the mobile devices that visitors are using.
What this does is, it helps to make the website more accessible and the user can go to the desired section of the website in a matter of seconds.
When building a mobile website, the interface and content on the website are formatted in a way that not only will make navigation easier, but also will assist in optimizing your website for touch screens.
What does it mean when a Website is Mobile Friendly?
Almost 91 percent of mobile users say that access to the content is critical in deciding whether the website is good enough to engage with or not.
This simply means that your website’s bounce rate will spike if users don’t find what they are looking for.
When a website is Mobile friendly:
- Users find it easier to read the text
- They can easily navigate through the website
- The website looks aesthetically great
Google says 61% of users are unlikely to return to a mobile site they had trouble accessing and 40% visit a competitor’s site instead.
- 57 percent of the people would not recommend a business with a bad mobile site.
- 40 percent of the visitor turns to a competitor’s website after they have a bad mobile experience.
- 23 percent of the adults have cursed at their phones when a site fails to function.
These are important insights which scream only one thing: “BUILD A MOBILE FRIENDLY WEBSITE!!”
Why is it Important to Build a Mobile Friendly Website?
Building and having a mobile website can create a huge impact on your business.
Over more than a year ago, the number of mobile users exceeded the use of desktops to browse the internet.
This is an important fact as today, more than half of the online traffic comes from mobile devices.
Therefore, this makes it the most important reason to consider making a mobile friendly website as most of your customers will visit your website via their phones and tablets.
Google itself says that it gives preference to the mobile friendly version when it comes to indexing a website.
Apart from this, your business will receive numerous benefits once you turn your existing website into a responsive mobile friendly website.
How a Mobile Friendly Website helps Businesses?
To begin with, how it helps businesses, it’s important to realize the gravity of the present situation.
Mobile Devices drive more than 52 percent of online traffic and account for nearly 2 of every 3 minutes spent online.
Here are the benefits of a mobile friendly website:
1. Increased Website Traffic
The growing number of mobile users provides a great opportunity for businesses to attract a huge number of customers to their site by ensuring an impeccable mobile experience for them.
Google’s algorithms are designed to find whether a website has a mobile friendly website design or not.
If not, it is less likely to show your website on top of the search results if there are websites in your competition that have a rich mobile experience.
No matter how good your content may be, Google will not help your cause.
This will drastically drop your rankings in the search engines and you will be left far behind your competition.
It’s all uphill from that standpoint.
So it’s better to build a mobile friendly website and ensure that visitors get what they want seamlessly.
This will not only help you gain authority on search engines but also you will receive a surge of new visitors.
2. Enhanced User-Experience
User-experience is key here.
[click_to_tweet tweet=”When you as a business provide your visitors with a mobile website that is easily accessible, smooth in navigation and has brilliant content, you improve their user-experience by a huge margin.” quote=”When you as a business provide your visitors with a mobile website that is easily accessible, smooth in navigation and has brilliant content, you improve their user-experience by a huge margin.”]
It’s more likely that your visitor is using a smartphone or tablets to check your website out and seek for the products you offer.
Therefore, it’s essential for businesses to be ready with a mobile friendly website to cater to both the desktop as well as mobile users.
Better User Experience = Higher SEO Ranking
Google is known to index websites on the grounds of user-experience.
So, it’s more than essential now to work on providing a better mobile website experience to the visitors and improve your SEO ranking.
3. Increased Conversion Rates
With increased traffic coming towards your website your business has a great opportunity to engage the target customers with a compelling content and mobile friendly website design strategy.
This will help you get more qualified leads.
More and more people will come and visit your website as you start to grow on search engines, and when you provide them with a better user experience, you will manage to boost your conversion rates as well.
Let’s face it.
A far majority of the people shopping online are mobile users.
They are in constant search for products and services as they surf through the internet.
If businesses like you don’t provide them with convenient navigation and content that they are looking for, you are setting your business to lose both existing and potential customers.
For them, your competitor’s website is the next stop.
Remember, you build a website to help online users find your business easily.
Magic happens when you build a website for your customers – increased traffic, higher customer conversion rate, and positive ROI – your business will bloom.
4. Bounce Rate Reduction
It might sound harsh, but the reality is:
It’s easier for mobile users to press the back button and move onto the next website than trying to figure out your website.
Once a user is on your website, you should try to engage with him as long as possible.
[click_to_tweet tweet=”If the user has to squint, zoom in or have to install additional programs on their phone to access your website, nobody can stop you from developing a high bounce rate.” quote=”If the user has to squint, zoom in or have to install additional programs on their phone to access your website, nobody can stop you from developing a high bounce rate.”]
Making website mobile friendly and deploying content carved especially for the users will dramatically reduce your bounce rate.
With an intuitive experience, you can successfully engage with your visitor and attract a longer session on your website.
A mobile friendly website makes the visitor engage with your brand – a great marketing strategy in itself.
The significance of Page Load time can be neglected by no means.
It can greatly affect your website’s conversion rate.
A delay of one-second in page load time can drop the conversion rates of your website by seven percent!
Still not surprised?
[click_to_tweet tweet=”A two-second delay in page load time shoots up your bounce rate by 87 percent!” quote=”A two-second delay in page load time shoots up your bounce rate by 87 percent!”]
When you optimize your website for mobile devices, pay major attention to the website’s speed.
Better the Speed, Better the User Experience.
Better the User Experience, Lower the Bounce Rate.
5. Increased Customer Loyalty
Want to gain customer loyalty?
Build a mobile friendly website MORE for the customer and LESS for the brand.
When you have just the right responsive mobile friendly website design, the smoothest navigation, and an impeccable content, customers realize your effort and your reputation increases.
This improves the brand image by a huge factor.
A satisfying website experience, especially on mobile, builds trust with your customers and establishes brand authority.
How to convert a website to Mobile Friendly Website?
When building a website, a developer might undergo various challenges to help you gain the benefit of a mobile friendly website.
With these practical tips, creating a mobile friendly will be an easy task!
Here is how you can make your website mobile friendly:
Tip #1: Choose a Responsive Website Design
We recommend building a responsive website design that has all the same content and information regardless of the device you access it on.
In a responsive design, the content gets rearranged based on the screen size of the device in question.
This is the best way to set out building a mobile friendly website.
With a responsive design, you don’t limit the information and content that your mobile visitors can access.
Responsive design does better when it comes to SEO for search rankings.
Google claims that a responsive format is what they prefer for mobile websites.
Tip #2: Put Important Information Easier to Find
There are always two kinds of visitors to a website.
First ones are the ones who have patience.
They come to a website and don’t mind taking time to adapt to the design and scroll to find their desired information.
And then there is the other kind – impatient and unforgiving visitors, who won’t mind pressing the back button and go to another website in case your website did not satisfy their needs.
We as business owners need to give what the customer wants, right?
So the most important thing to do is to find out the pieces of information that people would like to consume and put them at obvious places.
Make the information easier to find to make the visitor engage with the website for a longer duration.
Tip #3: Turn Autocorrect for Forms
We know what you are thinking.
How can such a small thing make a website user-friendly?
Well, working on small things like this makes a huge difference in the end.
If you have forms on your website that require the user to enter his name, email address, phone number and other such information, one small way to help out the user is turning off autocorrect.
Turning Autocorrect to an off state will not change a user’s name or city to a more common word. This will not slow down the process of filling out a form.
Tip #4: Check the Size of the Buttons on the Website
When it comes to laptop or desktop, clicking on a button is easy as it gets.
But when it comes to a mobile device, clicking on a button can become an issue.
The buttons and options used on a website should be bigger in size.
The developer should make sure that multiple small buttons are not in the same vicinity. Small buttons are hard to deal with.
Bigger buttons will save you from the wrath of your website user.
Tip #5: Use Large Font Sizes
Reading on a smartphone or tablet can become an issue if the size of the text is too small.
To begin with, try 14px on your web pages, but try out different sizes until you find the right look.
Also, try sticking with standard fonts.
You don’t want a visitor to download a font for his browser.
All this takes time and might make the visitor leave.
Tip #6: Allow the Visitor to Switch to Desktop View
There are mobile visitors who might want to check out or prefer to view your desktop version of your site.
This might happen if you go with a mobile version of a website instead of a responsive site.
Make sure you give them a way to make the switch as easily as possible.
Here are the Top Five Online Tools to Create a Mobile Friendly Website
It might become a challenge for businesses to create a mobile friendly website.
Although there are many tools that can help you out create a mobile friendly website, we have shortlisted the Top Five Tools here.
1. Google Mobile Optimizer
Google Mobile Optimizer is known for its speed at which it turns a regular website into a mobile friendly website.
Though this service renders your website into a mobile friendly website that is non-customizable, it makes it much suited for a user to view on a mobile.
2. Mobify
Running on a freemium model, Mobify offers you with a user-friendly and intuitive Graphical User Interface.
It takes a few minutes to create a mobile friendly website on Mobify.
Mobify has its own Mobile Commerce platform dedicated to providing website development solutions for e-commerce stores.
It makes sure the platform work faster and effectively for e-stores running on the internet.
3. MobilePress
MobilePress is one of the best tools there is for making a mobile friendly website.
A plugin on WordPress, it renders a mobile friendly website of your WordPress website or blog.
This plugin is free and very easy to use. Time spent on this tool to create a mobile friendly website is very little and it’s certainly effective.
4. Winksite
Winksite is the easiest way to make a mobile website. No developer or programming knowledge is necessary.
In just minutes, you can create a fast-loading mobile website that balances usability with innovative design.
Winksite provides the freedom to post whatever you want, wherever you are, to whomever you choose.
5. Wirenode
It’s good to know that several leading market giants, like Nokia, Ford and so on have used this tool to develop a mobile version of their websites.
It has a free plan that entails a user-friendly editor which can be used to set up a mobile site.
This tool offers free hosting up to three mobile websites and provides comprehensive reports, statistics and so much more.
Final Thoughts
In this relentlessly growing mobile world, where portability and speed are the top two factors that will decide the market winner.
If you have a website that does not take care of the user experience, you will definitely lose in the market share.
Creating a Mobile Friendly website is not just about designing a brilliant responsive model, it is more about understanding what the customer wants out of your mobile website and how can you provide that to him without any hassle.
Businesses need to ask themselves tough questions when it comes to providing a website experience – a strategy that will keep them in the competition for years to come.
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