Roughly half of the visitors to the average small business website use a smartphone or mobile device. For some industries, this can be even higher. While you might not hire a web developer while browsing your phone, looking at a new fitness facility or clicking through FB ads are more often done on phones over laptops.
A website that hasn’t been optimized for mobile devices will lead to an annoying experience for your visitors. They’re not going to stay on your website if it’s hard for them to use.
Over the last decade, access to smartphones + tablets has grown significantly. This has led to a change in user behavior + mindsets. Users on mobile devices are typically used to receiving instant access to the information that they search for.
Optimizing your current theme so that it works correctly on mobile devices is known as making a website “responsive.” It’s referred to in this way, as it means the website responds to the screen sizes of different devices, automatically resizing content. A number of years ago, mobile themes were made available on WordPress as plugins. It’s a quick fix for sites that don’t work on mobile, but not a great long term solution.
How does your website currently display on your smartphone? Is it easy to use?
Make sure you use your website as if you were a potential customer. Imagine it’s your first visit + you’re looking to find some more information on the products or services that your company sells.
- Is it easy for a visitor to find this information?
- Is there anything that’s hard to read or use on your website?
- Does everything work as you’d expect?
If you’ve had a new website designed in the last few years, you’ll likely already have a responsive website. So when you picked up your smartphone to test your website, you saw everything looked great.
But what if it didn’t look great?
That gives you an opportunity to make changes.
Create a list of any issues or hiccups that you find. If there are a few, it might be easier to separate this out on a ‘per page’ basis. Once you’ve finished the list, you can either work through it as you have time or hand it off to your web developer.
Once your website is properly optimized, you can feel confident in it’s ability to help your mobile traffic. You’ll be offering your visitors + customers a great browsing experience. Every user will be able to enjoy your website, no matter what device they use.
PS: Not sure how much of your site traffic is on mobile devices? You can use Google Analytics to track the device type.