In an age when smartphones play an increasingly important role in everyday life, it’s hard to believe that 24% of business websites are still not mobile-friendly. If your website is part of that minority, you are missing out on a lot of opportunities and could be letting sales slip through your fingers. Here are six reasons why you need a mobile-friendly website.
- Everyone has a mobile phone
Well, maybe not everyone, but certainly the vast majority. According to Statista, by the end of 2022, there will be a predicted 63 million active monthly smartphone users in the UK. That’s out of a total population of 67.2 million. Most of those that don’t have them are aged under 4.
Nearly all those smartphone owners will use their devices to search the internet. If you don’t have a mobile-friendly website, your business will be hard for them to reach online.
- More mobile than PC traffic
With so many smartphone users, it’s understandable that mobile search has overtaken searching for computers. In 2021, 50.5% of UK traffic were mobile devices, while globally, the figure was 55%. This percentage is set to rise as mobile devices become more sophisticated, resulting in fewer people needing to buy a laptop for home use. With people being able to do more things on phones, tablets and smart home devices, the home PC are set to take a back seat. Websites that are focused on PCs, therefore, will eventually work for fewer and fewer people. - Mobile shopping on the rise
People are increasingly using their mobile phones to buy online. A third of UK online shopping is now done using a smartphone with almost 80% of owners using their phones to make a purchase in the last six months. By 2024, annual mobile sales within the UK are predicted to exceed £100 billion.This figure doesn’t include the growing number of people who will buy in-store after using their mobile devices to find out more about the products they come across. Additionally, many people out and about will use mobile phones to find nearby businesses, including retail, food and drink and other service providers.
- Mobile behaviour is different
People behave in different ways depending on whether they are using their smartphone phone or their laptop. Laptop browsing is often more leisurely and sustained, people generally have more time to search for and research products. Those on mobile phones tend to search more frequently but for shorter periods, often between doing other things. They’ll search between ads on TV shows, between tasks at work, or if something interesting has popped up on their social media feed.This difference affects their relationship with the sites they visit. On mobiles, they want pages to load instantly, content to be easily accessed and to pick up where they left off, whether they are using their mobile phone or shifting to another device. If a site isn’t optimised for mobile viewing, they’ll simply leave and look elsewhere.
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Get more visitors
Search engines have long understood that users are shifting to mobile browsing. If they are to deliver great service to their users, they need to make sure that the sites they rank at the top of their results pages will work perfectly when a user visits, regardless of what device they are using. What this means is that mobile-friendliness is now an important part of a search engine’s ranking criteria. If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, it will affect how well it ranks in search results and the number of people who visit could be dramatically reduced. -
Benefit from social media
Most people use mobile apps to access their social media and many will share products and services they like on their social media accounts. If websites are optimised for mobile viewing, it makes it far easier for people on mobile devices to share the content with their friends and followers. As a result, they can attract new audiences and increase sales.
How to get a mobile-friendly website
Although you can pay a web developer to create a mobile-friendly website for you, the easiest and most affordable way to make your site mobile-friendly is to use a responsive theme. These are programmed to display differently, depending on which device they are being viewed. To ensure that the site is optimised for mobiles when you install a responsive theme, focus on your mobile version when setting up your pages. You can then test how mobile-friendly it is using Google’s free Mobile-Friendly Test which will give you feedback about how you can make improvements.
Remember that mobile websites also need to load quickly, regardless of how good a connection a smartphone user has got. The easiest way to ensure this happens is to upgrade your hosting to a more powerful plan. Choosing a host that offers the latest Intel Xeon processors and super-fast SSD hard drives on their hosting packages can boost your site speed significantly.
Conclusion
If you are one of the 24% of businesses that still does not have a mobile-friendly website, you could be losing out to competitors that have. Upgrading your hosting and using a responsive theme could boost search engine ranking, significantly increase traffic, prevent users from abandoning your site and lead to growth in sales.
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