A year ago, mobile visitors accounted for 40% of traffic across all Conductor sites. As of last month, that number hit 57%. This trend of increased mobile traffic has continued over the past several years, and shows no signs of stopping. Which means, given the number of people accessing your site from a mobile device, it’s as important as ever to ensure the mobile-friendliness of your site.
The Benefits of Mobile-Friendliness
One benefit that optimizing for mobile provides is happier (i.e. less frustrated) visitors. Consider the last time you pulled up a website on your phone, and had to wait and wait while it loaded; or the time when you were browsing a site on your mobile device, and the layout and architecture of the site made it very difficult for you to either find what you were looking for, or to do what needed to be done? Many of us grow frustrated when a site's mobile experience is slow and cumbersome. By making sure your site is optimized for your mobile visitors, you're keeping them from experiencing that same frustration.
In addition to alleviating unnecessary frustration for your users, optimizing for mobile also helps keep visitors on the site. In some research conducted by Google, they found that 53% of visits were abandoned if a mobile site took longer than three seconds to load. Which means, if your site takes more than 3s to load on a mobile network, it's worth exploring what can be done to cut the load time.
Beyond user happiness and bounce rates, mobile optimization can also can also affect your site's position in search rankings. Google has been using page speed in its ranking for a while, but now also considers mobile-friendliness as a major factor. So if you care at all about how your site does in search results, paying attention to how it performs on mobile is becoming increasingly important.
Assessing Your Site
So, if having a mobile-friendly site helps in all these ways, how do you know if your site is mobile friendly or not? The best way is to pull it up on your phone or tablet and try to use it. Is it fast? Can you find what you’re looking for? If you experience any frustrations, your visitors will likely experience the same.
Another simple option is to use Google’s Mobile Friendly Test. Google will fetch and analyze your site, and tell you whether your site is mobile friendly or not. Google also provides a more detailed tool called PageSpeed Insights which will provide a score and detailed information about what can be done to improve your site’s performance. Both of these two are simple to use, and can help you define where your site currently is, and areas that can be improved.
As mobile traffic continues to rise, taking some time to access the mobile-friendliness of your current site is well worth the investment. Not only can it help with SEO rankings and bounce rates, but it ultimately serves to make the user experience for your mobile visitors as good as it can be.