The staggering growth of mobile devices, largely thanks to Apple, has meant that it is now essential that your business has a mobile friendly website to ensure that your visitors are able to easily browse your pages regardless of whether they are accessing it via a desktop computer, mobile phone or tablet.
Mobile-friendly websites, also known as responsive websites, have been built so that they display correctly across all devices. This provides your visitors with a vastly improved user-experience, which helps to increase retention levels and, subsequently, conversion rates, making it a vital tool for businesses of all sizes.
In fact, research has shown that conversion rates on mobile devices is lower than desktop computers and tablets, which is largely down to the fact that a high percentage of websites still fail to have a responsive design.
In October 2016, research carried out by Adobe showed that the cart conversion rate, for the 100 leading eCommerce websites, across mobile devices stood at 16%, making it far lower than tablets (22%) and desktop computers (26%). Further to this, 33% of users abandon a site if they cannot interact with it on their mobile device, whilst, according to Google, 53% of mobile users will leave a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
This is why responsive websites are essential these days, as they are fast, functional and designed to look great across all devices, whilst they offer the best possible user experience, which will, ultimately see your conversion rates and visitor retention levels rise.
So, what are the benefits of a responsive website?
Mobile Shopping is on the Rise: Mobile devices have ensured that it’s never been easier to buy online, with a massive 80% of consumers using their smartphones to purchase goods, so if your website is making it difficult for visitors to find what they are looking for then you are certainly missing out on sales.
This is why having a responsive website is so vital, as your visitors will be able to easily access your pages, find the products/services that you offer and complete the transaction with limited fuss.
The Social Media Knock-on-Effect: According to recent figures, there are now over 2 billion Facebook users, whilst over 80% of all social media usage is carried out on mobile devices, so, if you have a strong social media presence then, it is almost certain, you will be gaining a high volume of referral visits into your website via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the numerous other social media networks that are in existence.
If these visitors are heading into website that wasn’t responsive then they are highly likely to exit almost immediately. However, if they are taken into an all singing, all dancing mobile-friendly site then, the chances are, that they will browse your pages for a longer period of time, resulting in a greater conversion rate being achieved.
Improved Organic Rankings: Google’s approach to SEO evolves on a constant basis and, during recent years, they have become more and more focused on wanting to only show mobile-friendly websites when a search has been carried out on mobile devices. After all, Google is always stressing how they want to provide the best quality results for their users, therefore offering an organic preference to responsive websites is a logical step.
This has resulted in mobile phones having a separate Google search algorithm, which means that a high ranking website on desktop computers isn’t guaranteed to perform as effectively on mobile devices, especially if it fails to have a responsive design. As you can imagine, as the number of mobile searches increases, this is now becoming a far larger issue for businesses as they stand to lose out on sales and enquiries by not updating their website to become mobile-friendly.
So, if you are currently pushing your organic performance through SEO, but haven’t yet got a mobile-friendly website, then it’s time that you sorted it out while it’s not too late.
Adapt, Adapt, Adapt: A responsive website will ensure that your pages look great regardless of the device or screen size that they are being viewed on, ensuring that your visitors are given the best user-experience possible.
Unsure if your website is currently responsive? Take the Google mobile-friendly test here: https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly.
All of Jump 2 IT Media’s website designs are fully responsive and mobile-friendly, whilst also containing the very latest SEO elements to help boost your organic rankings on Google.
For more information on our mobile website designs please click here.
