Is Your Website Mobile-Optimized?: The Answer Could Be Costing You Sales

Businesses that have not optimized their website for mobile devices are likely losing customers and sales. In a fast-paced digital landscape, mobile responsiveness isn’t just a benefit, but rather is a non-negotiable necessity for businesses to remain competitive.

Over 63% of web traffic currently comes from mobile devices. That means brands without a mobile website are falling behind competitors, alienating potential customers and missing out on revenue opportunities.

Business owners, digital marketers, e-commerce brands and even content creators, each of whom often rely on digital engagement to drive results, should be focused on optimizing their website for mobile with the impacts it has on your user engagement, conversion rates and your overall bottom line. 

The time is now to audit your website and prioritize mobile usability, speed and accessibility during the design and development process. This includes keeping design simple with clean layouts, easy navigation and concise content, making users more likely to explore, and perhaps convert, on your website.

Here’s a closer look at the damaging effects of not having a mobile-optimized website, the key elements that help make your website mobile friendly and how to ensure a quality mobile experience for your customer base.

Why Mobile Optimization Is a Top Priority

Mobile optimization reformats your website across all mobile devices, including phones, tablets and anything in between. This ensures that your website is responsive, fast and user-friendly, with a quality display on all screen sizes. While a mobile-optimized website should remain aesthetically pleasing, it goes beyond that, as it should also focus on functionality, speed, and ultimately, driving conversions.

According to Think With Google, 74% of people who visit a mobile-friendly website are more likely to return to that site in the future. Visitors are also 67% more likely to purchase from a mobile-friendly website, according to Nielsen Norman Group. This shows that in addition to potentially losing sales, businesses may also be sacrificing trust and customer loyalty if their website is not mobile-optimized, or features elements like overlapping text, broken images and poor scrolling.

Another key factor to keep in mind when it comes to mobile is Google’s mobile-first indexing. Google evaluates your mobile website before desktop when ranking pages in search results, making mobile versions of websites the primary basis for appearing higher on search engines. As Google crawls and indexes the mobile version of your website, it evaluates content, relevance and user experience (UX). If your mobile site is still clunky, slow or hard to navigate, your business may be seeing a drop in search engine page results (SERPs).

With the importance a mobile-optimized website has, businesses should immediately audit their site to ensure it’s mobile friendly if they haven’t already. That includes analyzing elements like responsive design, touch-friendly navigation, loading speed, content size and readability.

Ways a Poor Mobile Experience Is Hurting Your Business

A poor mobile experience can have a significant impact on a business overall, affecting many specific factors such as:

• High bounce rates – Mobile users are often impatient, so if your site takes a while to load, users will abandon it. Think With Google notes that 53% of visits are abandoned if a mobile website takes longer than three seconds to load. Poor loading speeds, unresponsive design and confusing navigation all contribute to users leaving your site quickly, while potentially driving customers straight toward your competition.

• Lower search rankings – As mentioned above, sites that aren’t mobile-optimized can be negatively impacted in SERPs, meaning the mobile page experience is now inseparable from SEO. Mobile SEO can differ slightly compared to regular SEO, as it focuses a bit more on UX and optimal content. Not only will a poorly-optimized site lose traffic, but users will likely have a hard time even finding it in the first place.

• Reduced conversion rates – Even if users reach your site, they are unlikely to convert if they can’t navigate your site or easily complete a call-to-action (CTA). If you’re noticing mobile users are rarely filling out forms, making purchases or completing other important actions, it is time to assess your mobile design.

• Damaged brand perception – A frustrating mobile experience can reflect poorly on your brand, products and services. Inconsistent design, hard-to-read content or broken features can signify unprofessionalism and erode consumer trust. According to Kanopi Studios, 60% of users will not trust a company that has not optimized for mobile, while 57% of users won’t recommend a business with a bad mobile site.

• Lost competitive edge – UX is often a significant differentiator for consumers in competitive industries. With your competitors highly likely to be investing in mobile optimization, you’re giving them an open lane to win over even your most loyal customers without having your own mobile-optimized site.

The Key Elements of Mobile Optimization

To ensure that a website is truly mobile-optimized, businesses should focus on these key areas:

1. Responsive design

Your layout should automatically adapt to different screen sizes and orientations, giving users a proper UX.

Fixed-width layouts should be avoided. Tools like CSS media queries or flexbox can help create seamless transitions across devices by allowing different styles to be applied to a webpage based on the device or viewing context.

2. Page speed

Fast loading times are critical for UX and shouldn’t be significantly longer than the desktop version of your website, or the websites of your competitors. 

Utilizing lazy loading, a technique that delays loading media files until they are needed or enter the user’s sight, can be one key element to improve site speed. Businesses should also aim to avoid pop-ups on mobile that might capture attention on desktop, as these can not only slow site speed, but also negatively impact UX by taking up the whole screen, and perhaps proving difficult to close.

Additional elements to improve speed include image compression, browser caching, minimizing heavy file usage, avoiding renderblocking JavaScript and CSS, and content delivery networks (CDNs) – a network of servers distributed globally that can improve load speed and reduce latency. Removing unnecessary characters from code files reduces their size and can also help improve load times. Tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, which provides a detailed assessment of loading speeds, can identify potential bottlenecks.

3. Mobile-first navigation

Simplifying your menu and minimizing taps can be beneficial for site speed. Larger and thumb-friendly buttons and links, sticky navigation bars and simplified or collapsible menus can help provide clarity and ease of use.

Specifically, businesses should aim to make CTAs mobile-friendly. Buttons should be large enough to find while remaining distinct from other parts of the page. Additionally, buttons should avoid using too much text that makes them difficult to read while being placed in a prominent, easy-to-find location. Businesses with extensive product offerings or content libraries may also want to implement a search button, helping users seamlessly find what they are specifically looking for.

Similarly valuable information that is needed for users to contact your business, like a phone number, email address or live chat bot, should also be strategically placed and easy to touch. Online forms, another common spot where users interact on a website, should follow similar guidelines, being simple to fill out with large or auto-fill enabled input fields. Spacing is also key on forms, while reducing the number of steps to complete them can provide a better UX.

4. Touch optimization and imagery

An important key to remember with mobile is that users are interacting with their thumbs rather than a mouse or keyboard. Clickable elements should be appropriately sized for touch. It is wise to avoid tiny buttons and to ensure that tap targets are properly spaced to prevent misclicks. All buttons should be responsive and easy to tap, helping users to the next step of the customer journey.

Appealing images can be used to draw in users or even placed in tandem with CTA buttons, but shouldn’t disrupt the flow of the scroll on mobile. All images on mobile sites should be scaled proportionally through modern formats like WebP, offering smaller file sizes compared to older formats like PNG or JPEG. Square or vertical photos should be utilized over landscape, while all images should be clear and viewable on any size screen.

5. Content Optimization

Content is a primary focus of many business websites, but should look different on mobile than it would on desktop. Products or services should be featured at the top of mobile sites, as can a table of contents or a key topics section.

It is wise to avoid large blocks of text by using shorter paragraphs, while list formatting with numbers or bullet points can also be easier to read for users. Headers and images can be strategically placed to break up large blocks of text, while tables or complex images should typically be avoided to ensure a more seamless experience. Clear and easy-to-read fonts, such as sans-serif styles, are also recommended, while elements like headings, titles and white space can also be beneficial.

6. Mobile SEO

Use structured data, compress scripts and avoid intrusive interstitials (pop-ups or overlays). Schema markup in particular is a type of structured data that can help your content stand out for search engines, and in turn for users if your business appears in rich snippets or high in SERPs. 

Metadata, such as title tags and meta descriptions, should remain consistent across mobile and desktop. Make sure your mobile site doesn’t block CSS or JavaScript that Google needs to understand your content, as ensuring your mobile site properly renders is crucial. If search engines like Google can’t decipher the layout of your site, it could lead to lower search rankings.

Ultimately, mobile SEO is also positively impacted by ensuring that the key elements listed above are satisfied, including user-friendly navigation that will decrease bounce rate, and optimizing media or image files for speed without sacrificing quality. It is also important to maintain all SEO practices on mobile that you would on desktop, including reputation management stemming from monitoring all online listings and reviews.

How Mobile Trends Are Shaping Buyer Behavior

Mobile has evolved from a browsing engine to a decision-making platform. Part of this stems from social networks like Instagram, TikTok and Pinterest normalizing on-the-go buying behavior, pushing businesses to streamline their mobile UX.

Voice search and AI-powered chatbots are also being integrated into mobile sites to help with real-time shopping assistance. As a result, you might be missing out on the opportunity to interact with your audience where it is most engaged if your website isn’t mobile optimized.

“Near me” searches are another significant trend that have become more prominent. According to redlocalseo.com, 84% of “near me” searches occur on mobile devices. GPS accuracy of mobile devices compared to desktop has made appearing in these search results even more critical.

Ultimately, mobile optimization is now a pillar of modern SEO, UX and digital advertising strategies due to the increase in mobile use. A seamless mobile experience improves shopping and browsing behavior, which can have a direct impact on a company’s bottom line. It’s more important than ever for businesses to audit their mobile experience, optimize every touchpoint and put their customers’ mobile journey at the heart of their digital strategy.

Actionable Steps to Optimize Your Website for Mobile

A mobile-optimized website can mean the difference between growing revenue and plateauing sales. Businesses that have not optimized for mobile should do so immediately by following these steps:

1. Test your website

Google’s Lighthouse tool analyzes the performance, accessibility and SEO of web pages, and provides insights for improvement, giving a quick overview of what might need to be fixed. Regularly testing your website across various devices and browsers is recommended, checking for usability and performance issues. In addition, Google Search Console and Google Analytics can help track various mobile performance metrics.

2. Use a responsive content management system (CMS) theme or framework

Find a platform offering mobile-first templates that minimize manual adjustments and the need for separate website versions across various devices. 

3. Audit your site speed regularly

Using tools like GTmetrix or PageSpeed Insights on a frequent basis can help test speed and implement recommendations. Simple A/B testing and user feedback can also help businesses know what adjustments might need to be made.

4. Prioritize mobile-first design in development 

Businesses should aim to design for mobile first, and then scale up for desktop. The mobile design should feature user-friendly navigation with design elements like a hamburger menu (three-line icon). The goal is to help users find what they are looking for quickly while having to tap as little as possible.

5. Simplify your checkout process 

Businesses, particularly in the ecommerce space, can use things like autofill, digital wallets and one-click payments to speed up conversions on mobile. Sellerscommerce.com notes that 22% of shoppers will abandon their online cart if the checkout process is too long or complicated, showcasing the importance of ease of use on mobile sites.

6. Monitor analytics and heatmaps 

Tools like Hotjar or Microsoft Clarity can help show businesses where users might be dropping off of their website or getting stuck. Additional resources, like WebPageTest and Bing’s Mobile Friendliness Test Tool can also provide valuable insights on page loading speeds, mobile design and SEO. 

While Google used to classify based on accelerated mobile pages (AMP), using AMP is no longer required to rank. It is critical to focus on Core Web Vitals, metrics that directly impact mobile performance such as loading time, interactivity and visual stability, which Google now uses to rank pages.

Best Version Media Can Help Your Mobile-Optimized Website Thrive

Best Version Media can help take your mobile-optimized website to the next level through our online presence management.

By monitoring local listings and reviews from one convenient dashboard, and managing geo-targeted display and social ad campaigns, BVM can help more users find your mobile site through increased visibility on search engines.

Connect with BVM today to continue growing your digital marketing strategy.