We've said it many times before: one important key to a successful website is ensuring it is mobile-friendly. What does this mean? It means that all key functions are operational and do not change no-matter what device you are using (mobile or desktop). There is a slight difference between mobile-friendly and mobile-responsive. -Responsive refers to a website's ability to change depending on which device you are accessing it from, BUT the key to a mobile-responsive site is that there is no essential information missing from a mobile site versus a desktop site. This might mean that the design changes from a 3-column wide design to a single-column stacked design, or that your navigation menu changes from a horizontal bar to the traditional "burger" menu.
Either way, with over 60% of website traffic coming from mobile users, it is imperative that your site works efficiently across all devices. But how do you really know? What is intuitive to you as the site owner, may not be quite so to the average user. Testing is important! Of course, nothing beats live testers, but you can limit the amount of time and money you invest on live testers by first testing your site with some pretty handy online tools. Google provides a great mobile-friendly testing tool, which only requires a few seconds of your time per page. Simply input the address for each page and it will populate a report, as in the image above. The only downfall is that it will not crawl an entire site, so this must be done for each page. Don't spend too much time on this if you have an extremely large and complex site, but get the main pages down before moving to live testers.
If your pages are not rated as mobile-friendly, there are plenty of options depending on what the issue is, however you can bet that most of it comes down to design - the simpler the better. Our recommendation? Have a web design expert (like Concept Computers Website Design) have a look at your site and implement the necessary changes.
Need some help? We can do that! To speak to one of our web design experts, come see us in-store at 1257 Marine Drive in North Vancouver or give us a call at 604-986-7680.
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