I have been designing and building websites for almost 20 years and during that period have seen websites evolve tremendously.
Without a doubt the most important development recently has been the need to make websites mobile friendly so that they automatically twist and adjust to fit smaller screens.
“More Google searches take place on mobile devices than on computers in 10 countries including the US and Japan.” Google, 2015
Mobile friendly websites are essential for two reasons:
- Users are impatient, they expect websites to be perfect, and if they’re looking at a website on a mobile phone which isn’t formatted correctly, loads slowly, or requires them to keep zooming in and out, they aren’t likely to stay very long. By not having a mobile friendly website you could quite literally be throwing away half your customers.
- Google love them so they're important for SEO. In 2015 Google started prioritising mobile friendly websites in mobile searches, and recently they have announced that in May 2016 they are increasing the effect of this ranking signal.
These days it’s not only important that your website works on mobiles and tablets, but it’s imperative that it works well. In some sectors mobile users are even a higher priority than desktop ones.
Using Google’s free tool you can check if your website is mobile friendly, but we’d always suggest going one step further and testing this yourself manually.
https://www.google.co.uk/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/
Making your website mobile friendly doesn’t necessarily mean starting again with a costly rebuild. Depending on how they are built many websites can have this functionality fitted retrospectively.
If you want any advice, or would like to know how much it would cost to make your website mobile-friendly, please do not hesitate in getting in touch.
We are Webbed Feet UK, we make mobile friendly websites.