Do I Need a Mobile Friendly Website?

Imagine you have crafted the perfect business.

You have worked long and hard to get things just right, and you have slaved away in a DIY website builder bringing a killer website to your online customers. As you eagerly await the massive amount of orders this website deserves, the results are mediocre at best. You struggle to understand why.

You begin frantically scouring your website looking for an obvious mistake or problem, but there are none to be found.

Then comes a lightbulb moment.

You call a friend, ask them to check out your website and ask for their opinion. You excitedly wait for their praise and the first thing out of their mouth is, “Why is it so tiny?”

“What do you mean, ‘tiny’?” you ask.

Your friend replies, “Here – I’ll send you a screenshot.” *ding* You open the photo on your phone and, to your horror, the beautiful website you designed is shrunk down, the tiny text is almost impossible to read and you begin to understand why those orders are not rolling in.

Customers have been bouncing right off your website because they can’t really interact with it on a mobile device. The few orders you do have are all from people using a desktop computer.

This is why you need a mobile friendly website!

What exactly is a mobile friendly website?

Mobile friendly websites allow a mobile user to experience the website in a readable and easily navigable format designed just for their screen size.

Generally, desktop sites that look great on a monitor will translate to a tiny site that is hard to use and is unhelpful for mobile users.

There are two main options to choose from when making your website a great experience for mobile users.

Mobile friendly vs. mobile responsive

Mobile friendly and mobile responsive both offer mobile users a great-looking, functional site on smartphones and tablets. Let’s take a look at the difference between mobile friendly and mobile responsive.

Mobile friendly websites are separate sites designed specifically for mobile devices. So, basically, you have two different websites, one for desktop, one for mobile.

Mobile Responsive websites have coding that allow the same site to dynamically change depending on the screen size of the user viewing your website.

At Qualbe, all of our websites are mobile responsive. This really is the best way to do it if you have the capability.

So, besides user experience, why do you need a mobile friendly website?

Enter search engine giant: Google. They have clearly stated (details here) that all websites need to be mobile friendly or it will severely hurt search rankings. What a mean thing to do, right? Not really! Google desires all of its users to have an amazing experience on any type of device (and you should too).

Google has also stated that they plan on rolling out a mobile first index to their algorithm this year. This means the search engine robots will look at the content quality of your mobile website and rank you based off of that instead of your desktop website.

If you have a mobile responsive website, this won’t affect you at all! Just continue writing great content for the site like you should be. If you have a mobile friendly website (aka a separate site for mobile), you will want to make sure to have great content on the mobile website so you will continue to rank high.

I imagine this brings more questions to mind. Here is more information on Google’s mobile first index.

So, all that being said, “Do I need a Mobile Friendly Website?”

Until next time. – Camrann Coker