Are your websites mobile-optimized? If someone from a mobile phone, or tablet finds your website – can they navigate and purchase your products and services easily? If not, you’re losing valuable traffic.

 

Should My Website Be Mobile?

Mobile usage has seen an exponential rate of growth over the last few years. We only need to look at some statistics to show that business websites must be adapted for mobile users.

Mobile devices are now used as work terminals in the workplace. In a trend called “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) as many as 59% of business organizations now allow employees to do their work and access their corporate database on a mobile device.

Mobile usage statistics

  • A report published by Reuters states that 75% of Internet use in 2017 will be from mobile devices.
  • The Search Engine Journal (SEJ) claims 75% of Internet traffic will be mobile in 2017.
  • 80% of social media time is spent on a mobile device (comScore).

However:

  • 89% of mobile media time is spent on apps, and only 11% is spent on websites (Smart Insights).
  • For research, 33% of consumers visit branded websites and 26% start with an app (Smart insights).

Mobile use and e-commerce

Hosting Facts, in a report titled E-Commerce and Conversion Statistics 2018, projects the following trends and findings:

  • Mobile commerce will amount to 45% of all e-commerce sales by 2020.
  • Desktop conversion at 8.52% leads mobile conversions at 4.70%.

The compelling need for a mobile-optimized website

  • 57% of users claim they won’t recommend a business that presents a poorly designed mobile site (socPub).
  • Google claims 61% of users will not return to a badly designed mobile site.
  • 70% of users delete emails that do not display properly on a mobile site (Blue Hornet)

 

There are two ways to build a mobile website. You either build a responsive site or an adaptive mobile site. Both solutions eliminate fixed width page design and display the content in variable width and adjusted to the screen size of the mobile device.

Responsive design

This design loads faster because it uses a minimum of screen resizing and scrolling on devices ranging from mobile phones to desktop computer monitors.

The website content adjusts itself to the screen size of the device on which the content is displayed.

There is an easy solution for launching a responsive mobile site.  Construct your site on the WordPress platform and buy a responsive theme. There are many such themes available.

Responsive design offers the optimal viewing experience on different screen sizes.

Adaptive design

With this design, there is not one layout that changes in response to the available screen size. Instead, there are different site layouts for different screen sizes. You can have a different layout for different mobile screens, tablets, and desktop monitors.

The site automatically detects what device is used to access the site and displays the pre-designed layout for that device.

 

As the usage of mobile devices grows, it’s become abundantly obvious that if you want to succeed in today’s e-commerce environment, you NEED to ensure that your websites are optimized for viewing from those devices.

If you have any questions about the mobile-optimization of your websites, please contact me.