It’s been almost two years since overall Internet usage on mobile phones surpassed desktop devices and still, businesses don’t have mobile-friendly sites! Total madness.
There are hundreds of reasons why businesses should have mobile-friendly websites. Do I need to mention it’s 2018?
Here are three, cast-iron reasons to go responsive.
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Mobile users buy more
Mobile is convenient. There’s little load time, no waiting around for devices to start up, and, as the name suggests, it’s mobile. Mobile-friendly sites can be accessed from pretty much anywhere which helps with impulse buys. People aren’t hanging on to the idea of purchasing when they get home on their PC – they want to do it now! Accessible websites enhance the customer experience. The better the experience, the more likely they are to purchase – and the stats back that up.
On average, 15% of desktop users make purchases at least once a week, whereas 35% of mobile users make purchases at least once a week. If they hit a website that is hard to navigate on mobile or doesn’t feel intuitive, they’ll take their business elsewhere – and with the power of mobile they’ll be making that purchase with your competitor in about 30 seconds.
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It’s cost effective
Responsive website design ensures that webpages adapt to the device it is being viewed on to ensure a consistent structure and experience. This is important because without responsive design sites either look outdated or will load different adaptations which increase the design and maintenance costs.
More so, it massively improves search engine optimisation which will make a huge difference to the marketing budget. Almost 60% of Google searches are made on mobile phones, so Google doesn’t like websites that are not mobile-optimised and punishes those sites by pushing them down the search results.
Social media advertising also benefits from improved efficiency and efficacy from mobile optimisation. Take Facebook, for example. Over 90% of Facebook users access the service with a mobile device.
Social media is a time-filler; when people are commuting, waiting in line, avoiding the advert break, or enjoying an antisocial lunch to get away from Brian who hasn’t stopped talking about his latest muscle car restoration project – we get it Brian, you build cars as a hobby – and the mobile phone is an easy and readily available distraction.
So when people are clicking your links on social media, they want to travel seamlessly to a site that doesn’t look like 2004 threw up on it.
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User experience
User experience is everything these days. A positive experience is accessing an intuitive site that doesn’t require users to pinch and zoom to find something or build up frustration trying to navigate to a page the user knows they can get to in a single click on their PC.
Frustration will send visitors to mobile-optimised competitors and the chances of winning them back are slim with Google figures showing that 61% of users are unlikely to return to a site they found difficult to access.
Mobile optimisation avoids the unnecessary loss of customers and deals with the scourge of all Internet marketing campaigns: user impatience. Consumers have been spoiled with convenience and speed for so long that, according to Kissmetrics, a single second delay in website loading time can see a 7% reduction in customer conversions.
Google standards dictate that a webpage should load in two seconds. A responsive site can do that; a desktop site loading on a mobile device has no chance.
Those are just three basic reasons to invest in a responsive, mobile-friendly website. If your website isn’t responsive, just think about how, in the time it took you to read this article, 15 of your potential customers could have been through the entire purchasing process with your mobile-optimised competitors.
