If you’re tech savvy, you also know that it’s smart to optimize your website for mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. But do you know exactly why? You might be surprised.
No matter how pretty your website looks on a mobile browser, chances are that if it’s not optimized beyond desktop and laptop screens, it’s really hard to read unless the mobile user taps or stretches the page.
According to a report from Google’s research labs, nearly three out of four Internet users prefer a mobile-friendly site. Additionally, 95 percent say they’ve encountered plenty of sites that were not designed and built for mobile devices.
Nearly 75 percent of mobile users say that a mobile-friendly site is likely to get a return click from them in the future. Also, 67 percent say that they are far more likely to purchase from a mobile-optimized site than one that isn’t optimized.
According to a July 2013 survey conducted by econsultancy.com, 55 percent of companies reported that they have optimized their websites for mobile.
Let’s not forget that when your site isn’t optimized for mobile devices, you’re giving your competitors a leg-up. That’s because more than 60 percent of mobile users said if they couldn’t quickly find what they were looking for on a mobile site, they’d move on to another site immediately. And nearly 80 percent will search other sites if they don’t like what they find on the first one they choose.
SquareHook CEO and founder, Joshua Maag, says that his company’s technology enables organizations to more easily build mobile-optimized sites. Its CMS is built around Twitter Bootstrap, a CSS Framework that uses responsive design and media queries to help scale a website up from mobile to tablet and desktop.
“We are always looking at ways to use the Framework for our customers,” Maag says. “All of our themes are based on Twitter Bootstrap. In addition, our drag and drop editor outputs the grid structure from Bootstrap so even the content will scale and adjust according to the device. This is something that traditional CMS have struggled to provide and usually only focuses on a basic text editor.”
Half of those polled by Google said that even if they already like a business, they are less likely to use their services or products as often if the site isn’t mobile-friendly.
So what’s a small business owner to do? Simple: create a mobile version of your site-or pay someone to do it for you. One company I recently discovered is focused on just that-helping websites adapt to each kind of device that accesses them.
“Globally, 1 percent of all websites on the internet are using Bootstrap in particular,” says Maag. “From most of our sample data and research, total mobile friendly, responsive sites out there are in the 5 percent range. There is plenty of room to grow. In some of the markets we are targeting, the percentages are even lower. For example, we have a list of 2600 companies that are in the semiconductor industry. Of that 2,600, only 27 have a mobile friendly website, most are still creating static html websites.”
