Website Redesign - Reason 1 Mobile Friendly

First in a series answering the question of “Why Do I Need to Redesign My Website?”

Answer Number 1 - Because more people are viewing your website on their phone than their computer. For many business owners this is old news. You’ve used a smartphone for years and know how productive it makes you and how easy it is to research any topic, say “How often do I need to redo my website?”.

Depending on what statistics you look at Mobile traffic to websites is either close to desktop numbers or even exceeds it. In the United States, it got within 1% in June of 2019 then dropped a bit according to Stat Counter as shown below.



If we look at Worldwide statistics, it happened a long time ago, late in 2016.



The type of website you have and your target demographic will also affect what percentage of your traffic is mobile. A news site is likely to have a very large percentage of their traffic mobile. A service-based business that customers may call upon in an emergency is likely to have higher numbers. A dentist specializing in emergency dental procedures as an example was at 56% mobile.

You probably look at a fair amount of websites on your phone. Think back to the last website you visited that wasn’t mobile optimized (i.e. easy to read because the font was large enough to read without a magnifying glass, links were large enough and spaced far enough apart to touch the right one with your finger, not just a mouse, etc.). Did you stick around long? Pinch and zoom trying to read it? Constantly scrolling left and right because the content was wider than the screen? Unless the information on that website was extremely important to you, you did the same thing everyone else does, they hit the back button and try the next link in the Google search results.

You had a prospective customer at your site and you drove them away because your site is useless on a mobile device.

 
Answer Number 2 - Because Google now uses how your website performs on a mobile device to decide how to rank your site in the search engines. They call it Mobile-First Indexing. They’ve also got a pretty good page that clearly says, “If you haven’t made your website mobile-friendly, you should.” Since Google drives more potential customers to your website than likely any other source, you want to keep them happy!

Another page in the same series (Link:  ) talks about the approach you take to building a mobile friendly site is important as well. Google clearly recommends using responsive design as a solution to make your website mobile-friendly, easy to update, and easy for site visitors.

Years ago web designers would create a completely separate website just for smartphones. They would often strip out a lot of the images, videos, etc. to keep the site very streamlined and quick. A decade ago in a 3G world, that was important. Today, not so much. With 5G service potentially serving up a website faster than a cable modem in your home can, it isn’t necessary to strip down a website for a mobile device. Don’t get me wrong, speed is still terribly important, but even a 4G phone is up to the task.

In short, even if you have a mobile site, but it’s different than your primary website, it’s time for a redesign. The old m.website.com approach to having a separate site for mobile is out of date and should be replaced with a responsive website.

Responsive Web Design allows you to have one website that works well on desktop computers, laptops, tablets and of course smartphones. Problem solved, just one site to keep up to date with fresh content and your latest blog posts.

BANG! only designs responsive websites because it is so critical to the success of a businesses Internet Marketing strategy.
 
Next in our series of Website Redesign Reasons, Resolution.