For years, web designers and developers have been advocating that every business needs a mobile friendly website. But is that just hype, or does having a mobile friendly website really matter?
Your Website Users Really Are Going Mobile
You may think that the push for mobile friendly website design is just a marketing scheme by developers to get you to update your site. But across the board, website users are increasingly using their phones, tablets, and other mobile devices to go online. In 2015 mobile accounts made up approximately 31.9% of web traffic worldwide. By 2017, that number had hit 50%, and it has hovered around that point ever since. The most recent data for Q2 2019 is 48.91%.
Five years ago, you may have been able to get by without addressing the 30% of web traffic that was happening through mobile devices, but with over half of all users getting online using their phones and tablets, the mobile market is now too big to ignore
Dennis’s Desktop-Only Disaster
Dennis figured that his consulting business didn’t need to worry about having a fancy web design. His last website from 2014 did have a contact form button, but beyond that, he let the text and photos of his past jobs do the work for him. His sales process included meeting potential clients at networking events or getting referrals and then directing them to the website to fill out the contact form and start the bid process.
What Dennis didn’t realize was that when users took to their smartphones, his website was all but useless. The text was so small that users had to pinch and zoom in on the page just to read it. It did not wrap properly either, leaving users swiping back and forth to read each line. Those pictures that Dennis was so proud of were not optimized for mobile either. Many were uploaded at such a high resolution that they were bigger than the users’ screens, so they couldn’t see the whole thing at once. Then there was the contact form button. Placed in the upper right corner of his desktop site, it was off the screen on a phone – invisible to prospective clients unless they swiped around to look for it. Even then, it was so small that many clients had trouble clicking on it with their touchscreen.
Mobile Friendly Websites are Accessible and Visible
Dennis’s desktop-only disaster demonstrates just how important accessibility and visibility are on the web. Historically, you could assume most people were viewing your website on a standard monitor. Desktop-only websites often use the far right and left parts of the screen for easy-access tool bars and menus. These days the screens your visitors are using could be 4 inches or 40 inches wide. If your website isn’t responsive to the screen size, smaller screens lose all the information you are trying to put in front of them. As a general rule, if someone needs to go looking for something on your website, they aren’t going to find it.
And then there are the accessibility issues. When text is small, so are links, buttons, and form fields. Since touchscreens are necessarily less precise than a mouse cursor, that can make it hard for users to navigate around your site and get where they need to go.
The Marks of a Mobile Friendly Website
If Dennis were to contact the website development team at Provisio Technology Solutions, one of our top recommendations would be to upgrade to a mobile friendly website that is responsive to the screens his viewers are using. When all is said and done, our sites will be designed to make sure it includes:
- Text sizes of 14 point fonts or larger for easy reading
- High-contrast text and backgrounds for improved visibility
- Responsive design that adjusts layout, image sizes, and button placement based on screen size
- Highly visible links and easy navigation
- Accessible contact information, including click-through phone numbers and addresses
At Provisio Technology Solutions, we don’t want your website to scare potential customers away. We know how modern consumers use websites and will help you optimize your design, so you get the most for your money. Our web developers will meet with you to review your website’s performance on desktop and mobile, define your company’s needs and priorities, and develop a new site that all your clients can use. Contact us to set up a free consultation.