If you’ve ever had the displeasure of navigating a non-mobile friendly website, you’ll be all too familiar with those feelings of utter frustration as you try to wade through tiny texts and awkward menus.
So why inflict that on your own customers? The fact is that over 90% of internet users access the web via a mobile phone (compared to just 65% who use a laptop or desktop PC).
Smartphones are no longer the stuff of the elite. A Statista report indicates that, as of 2022, there were 6.64 billion smartphone users across the world, and this is set to rise to 7.5 billion by 2026. In the second quarter of 2022, mobile platforms accounted for 59% of overall web traffic, which is over 50% of global web traffic.
These days it is second nature for anyone to use their phone to find whatever they need, from football results and weather reports, to nearby shops and local services, and of course, somewhere to make their next purchase.
All of this makes it quite clear why it’s imperative that you avoid any scenario where your website is not mobile friendly.
Why Google doesn’t approve of non-mobile friendly websites
Back in September 2020, Google made a full shift to mobile-first indexing. This means that the search engine predominantly uses the mobile version of a website, crawled using its smartphone agent, for indexing and ranking a website.
So even if you’ve got an all-singing, all-dancing website that looks mind-blowing on a laptop or desktop PC and has been designed around a best in class user experience, if that same website doesn’t match up when viewed on a mobile device, you could find your search engine results page positions suffer as a result.
80% of the top ranked websites are optimised for mobile users. This goes to show that Google does give preference to mobile friendly sites.
Whilst Google doesn’t make it obligatory for every site to have a mobile version to have its content included in its search results, it does strongly recommend it.
Mobile-first indexing is enabled by default for all websites that are new to the web or previously unknown to Google Search.
For older or existing websites, Google continues to monitor and evaluate their pages based on their best practices. One of these is to create a mobile friendly website using ‘responsive design’.
What is responsive web design?
Responsive web design is a way of creating a website so that it automatically scales its content and changes its appearance to suit the device it is being viewed on. So whether you’re viewing a site on a huge great widescreen desktop monitor, a personal laptop, a tablet or a smartphone, you’ll see the same content, albeit a different size or layout.
Responsive design saves users of smaller devices the frustration of scrolling, zooming and resizing, allowing them to see what they want to see instantly.
Sites that do not respond to the screen size can be very difficult to navigate. They are prone to user frustration, and will often cost you potential customers, as well as risking damage to your brand reputation.
Before responsive design, you would traditionally have either a non-mobile friendly website, or a separate mobile version of the desktop site.
But thanks to responsive design, there is no longer a need to create a separate, dedicated mobile website (and pay more to host it). All you need is a single site that scales to fit the device it is being viewed on.
