When was the last time you visited your website from your phone? I can almost guarantee you've looked at it from your laptop within the last month. But your phone ... I'm guessing it's been a while. [If I could use emojis in my blog post, I'd have a grimacing face right here, so just pretend for me. Ok fine, here's an animated gif instead.]
According to some people who have studied this stuff, over 60% of website visits are from a mobile device. This isn't surprising. Aside from the work you conduct on your computer, how often are you searching and looking at websites from your phone? I know personally that number is nearly 100% of the time. I'm betting you are quite like me.
Depending on your industry and target demo, this can fluctuate. Check out your Analytics to see what your true percentage is. The fact remains that ensuring a good mobile experience for your site visitors is imperative to your online success. Nobody is building desktop-only sites anymore; everything is responsive in some way, even if it's a little less than desirable how seamless that transition is.
The Challenge
Your homework today is to take out your phone, if you aren't already on it, navigate to your company's website and use it like a customer or new visitor would.
- Go through checkout.
- Fill out a form. Could you check all the boxes, see all the fields, etc?
- Login to access your account.
- Can you easily navigate to key pages of your site?
- How easy are those buttons to click on?
- Does your menu navigation fit the screen properly?
- How easy or hard is it to find what you are looking for?
- Do the images fall off the side of the screen causing you to scroll side-to-side? How quickly do those images load?
After you've done your homework, email me and tell me how it went. Were you happy with the results? Either way, I want to hear about it! And no, this isn't some sales pitch (I leave that to the account managers and the biz dev guy). I'm genuinely curious how this went for you, regardless of if you are a JH client today or not. Go ahead, do the homework then come back and keep reading.
What now?
Great question! Now that you've experienced your site as a customer or prospect, you've probably found at least one thing you would want to improve. If not, then congrats - I'm proud of you and your web team!
If you didn't already know, Google ranks your website based on the mobile experience. The pages and content it can see on the mobile view of your website are considered when ranking your web pages. How users interact with your site on a mobile device is also considered. Google is no fool, they know that 60%+ of users are on a mobile device. They aren't going to serve up a poorly designed mobile site to users, even if the users aren't on a mobile device.
Ensuring your website is easy to navigate, loads quickly and is optimized for the mobile device visitor is key to your online success. If you don't want to use your website from your phone, then your customers probably don't either.
Hopefully, you've been able to identify some things that need some work. Work with your web team to make those improvements, or if you feel like you just need to start fresh then you can reach out to one of our account managers to start a conversation.
