Why a mobile-friendly website is a must

According to IDC (International Data Corporation), worldwide smartphone shipments topped one billion units in a single year for the first time, up 38.4% from the previous year. Samsung currently leads the market in worldwide smartphone shipments, following the success of its Galaxy S4 model last year, with Apple coming in second after its own iPhone 5C release.

So what does this mean? Well, with more and more people browsing the internet on their smartphone devices it becomes ever more important to ensure that your business website is optimised to be displayed on a smartphone screen. There’s nothing more irritating than opening a website on your smartphone and discovering that it isn’t optimised for mobile, resulting in you navigating their desktop site on a small screen, pinching and zooming in across the page to find what you want. People are likely to retreat from such websites and find one more friendly for them on-the-go.

So what are the mistakes you can make when optimising your website for mobile? A common one, according to Google, is unplayable videos. Many videos are not playable on smartphones, particularly in certain Formats, such as Flash, which is not supported by mobile devices. Another mistake is a faulty redirect, perhaps redirecting some mobile devices to the mobile site, but not others. Furthermore, a slow page speed can also be a hindrance to your mobile site. People want fast results and a heavy website can get in the way of this. Keep your site content available in as few clicks as possible and avoid pop-up windows.

Mobile phone screens are smaller than desktop screens and people won’t want to be bombarded with too much information when reading it from their smartphone, so it’s important to keep your mobile website simple and to-the-point, with only the most relevant information.

Experts recommend keeping your mobile website and desktop website the same; with the same HTML for each device and CSS deciding how the site is experienced by each device. Whichever option you take, it is clear that mobile phone optimisation is becoming extremely important when it comes to business websites and the longer a business might take to realise this, the quicker they might find themselves left behind.

Iñigo Etxebeste, Marzo 19, 2014