66% of all site visits for new clients in 2020 came from their mobile devices. This is for the 1,000 most visited websites in the world, compared to the previous year.
The answer to the question is it matters – a lot! It’s more important than ever for your website to navigate easily and quickly on a smartphone or other mobile device. And not doing so might cost you business – as much as 66% of your potential business.
I track analytics for 17 small business websites, mostly located in the Raleigh/Durham area. So far in 2021, the mobile usage for my clients is 50%. This indicates that at least half of your website users receive their first impression of your business on their mobile device. Yes, especially for small businesses.
But, Laura, you ask, how do I know if my website is mobile friendly?
Check it! Open your website on your phone. Navigate through your website pages.
- Is it easy to read?
- Does the hamburger menu appear (3 lines on top of each other)?
- Is the hamburger easy to see?
- Can you click on the phone number listed and call your business directly from your phone?
After you visually check your website on your phone, you can also go to Google Mobile Friendly Test here. -how did you score?
For those who aren’t web developers, you might simply assume your web designer made your site mobile-friendly and responsive. Many networking colleagues of mine call me, panicked when they realize their mobile website is hard to read and navigate on a phone. This likely makes their customers leave their website quickly– and hire someone else instead!
Your site might be mobile-responsive (it squeezes the text to fit on the screen) while not being mobile-friendly (the pictures, text, and menu appearance are adjusted for the smaller screen size, easier to read, and encourage your ideal clients to use your site to contact and hire you).
And Google knows how important the mobile experience is to users. They recently changed the way they rank your website, based on how fast your website loads on a mobile device! According to Search Engine Journal, your website needs to load in under 3 seconds.
You could count one Mississippi, two Mississippi…or check your mobile website speed here: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
Google Page Insights will tell you exactly why your website is loading slowly and make suggestions for increasing page speed. The suggestions will probably mention image size. Remove duplicate images, and reduce your image file size to around 400K before uploading. Large image files will make your website take longer to load.
If you find your website is super slow, looks horrible on mobile devices, or was designed more than three years ago, it might be time for a website overhaul – contact me to talk about your needs.
See this similar blog post -“Top 5 website mistakes small business owners make”
and stay tuned for my next blog post on “5 reasons you need a Google Business Profile”.
