Is your website mobile friendly? If not you could be missing out on more than 50% of your website’s potential as the importance of mobile friendly websites continues to grow. In 2015 the rise of smartphones is continuing and it is vital that you ensure you are catering to this market.
What is Responsiveness?
Put simply if a website is responsive then it detects what size of screen a visitor is using and displays the content in a way that is as usable as possible to that visitor. This means that whether they are using a smartphone, a tablet or a desktop they will always have a good user experience with your website.
Why Does it Matter so Much?
Take up of mobile devices has been on the rise for a number of years now and with 1 in 5 people in the world owning a smartphone and 1 in 25 owning a tablet it is not surprising that mobile browsing has now overtaken desktop browsing. This means that by not catering for this audience you risk achieving below 50% of your site’s potential return.
In addition to this Google are now formally recognising the importance of mobile friendly websites and from the 21st of April 2015 they will penalise non-mobile friendly websites in their search results.
This means that if you are top of the search results for a key phrase now, but your site is not mobile friendly and the sites below you are then your position may tumble.
Google’s blog post about these changes can be viewed here.
If you’re not sure if your website is mobile friendly or not here is a tool that you can use to test it.
Is Having a Separate Mobile Website Enough?
A few years ago a lot of sites were set up with separate mobile websites. This means that visitors on desktops see the desktop website and visitors on mobiles get redirected to a different website that is layed out to suit smaller screens.
The good news is that having a separate mobile site does satisfy Google’s test for mobile friendliness. However, a separate mobile site goes against best practice today for a number of reasons:
- They have separate web addresses making it more difficult to build authority in search engine results for your main address.
- They are not as future-proof, a responsive website is much more likely to be able to adapt to fit most new screen sizes as they come along.
- They are harder to manage, if you have a separate mobile website you probably have to update the content on each one separately, effectively doubling the work involved in keeping your site up to date.
So What Should I Do?
If your website isn’t mobile friendly it really is worth investing in to bring it up to date. Mobile devices are very much here to stay and you will see a return on your investment. So get in contact with your web developer and they should be able to advise on the next steps.
Here at Ezone Interactive we recognise the importance of mobile friendly websites and ensure that every WordPress website we build is responsive. If you are interested in our services simply complete the form in the right hand column on this page and we will be in touch.