Making your website “mobile friendly”: responsiveness
One of the main questions to address when running a site is “how do I get traffic to my website?” and two of the main ways to do so are the effective use of social media and good Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Google being the biggest search engine and Facebook (at time of writing) the biggest social network by far, it’s especially important to keep track of what they do.
Do you know how much traffic Facebook gets from mobile devices? The answer might surprise you: more than half of it. And when a site is as big as Facebook, that’s a lot of traffic.
So it would seem obvious – it’s very important to have a website that’s going to look good and load quickly on mobile devices as well as desktops because the increasing popularity of mobile phones and tablet devices for browsing the Web means that your business will rely on that traffic. And yet, many businesses are neglecting the changing browsing habits of their demographic and will be losing traffic because of it.
That lost traffic won’t just be because people get fed up trying to navigate a website not built for their screen size – Google can figure out if a website is responsive (that means it changes for mobile devices) and is favouring responsive websites in its search results. If “getting my website found” is high up on your list of priorities – and it definitely should be – getting yourself one of our mobile-friendly websites is an absolute must. They mean you get found in Google more, you’ll have a stunning website design and what’s more it comes with our custom-built Content Management System (CMS), making it very easy to manage indeed.
What a responsive website does
If you’ve used Google on a mobile device recently, you’ll notice that certain results bear the label “mobile friendly”. These are websites that Google can see that change depending on the users screen size – and that’s how responsive websites work. For instance, a menu that might go off the screen were it displayed on a mobile device will become much more compact, making the site easier to navigate with swipe controls.
Ease-of-navigation is really important, particularly for businesses using eCommerce websites. The online market is often very crowded, and if a user can’t find the information or product they’re looking for quickly, they’ll leave and try somewhere else. Likewise, many people won’t click more than the first couple of Google search results when they’re in a rush so getting the boost from a “mobile friendly” accreditation is absolutely vital.
Starting a business website
If you think your business is ready for a new responsive website, you can get in touch and pop along to our Chippenham web design office for a chocolate biscuit and a chat about how best to serve your clients’ needs.
Written By Kirsty Paget
