If a business website is not mobile friendly and “fully responsive”, you are definitely leaving a lot of money on the table in lost leads, sales, and even clients. Mobile friendly means fast loading, coded according to mobile standards and fully responsive. As a result, it’s easily accessible, provides a seamless experience and looks great on every device starting from your smartphone, tablet and ending with your desktop.
A mobile friendly website is optimised to load fast and look great regardless of the device used to access it. The desktop version of a site might be difficult to view and use on a mobile device. The version that’s not mobile-friendly requires the user to pinch or zoom-in in order to read the content. Users find this a frustrating experience and are likely to abandon the site. Alternatively, the mobile-friendly version is readable and immediately usable.
In fact, the majority of small businesses lose thousands of pounds in sales just because their website is not mobile friendly and fully responsive in 2017. Why? It’s very simple.
Mobile devices usage
We all know that mobile is a growing trend and is the inevitable future of all digital communication channels. Right? Well… not really! You could say that a few years ago, but the reality is we are in the future now.
If you look at the stats, across the globe, mobile devices like smartphones and tablets dominate total minutes spent online, over 60% in the UK and even 90% in Indonesia.
It doesn’t mean that over 60% of prospects and customers visit your website on mobile only. Some of the visitors still use desktop only, some of them only mobile. However, most of them are multi-platform users which mean they are using desktop and mobile devices alternately to access your website.
If you look at the graphic below, you can see that the vast majority of prospects and clients visiting your website are multi-platform users and mobile users.
It may differ from niche to niche but in general, it means your website is visited by an overwhelming majority of prospects and customers who use mobile devices. Mobile is not going anywhere. In fact, mobile is growing rapidly and has already overtaken desktop. Whether you like it or not you need to accept this situation and adapt your digital content as soon as possible. You should start with your website.
How not having a mobile friendly website affects your bottom line
Now you know that a lot of your prospects and customers are visiting your website using mobile devices. What happens when someone visits your website and it is not fully responsive and mobile friendly?
According to Google:
- 72% of consumers want mobile friendly websites.
- 90% of the visitors will leave a mobile website if they can’t find what they’re looking for right away.
- 61% of users are unlikely to return to a website they had difficulty accessing on mobile, and 40% will instead go to a competitor site.
This is ridiculous. Just imagine how many of your prospects and clients visiting your website are likely to leave and never come back. How much does it mean to your business and how many clients, sales, and money can you be losing just because of this? What’s worse, 40% of them will leave you and go to your competition…
In fact, when your website is not mobile friendly and fully responsive it not only drastically affects your number of visits but also your sales and bottom line.
The other important fact is if your business doesn’t have a mobile friendly website it doesn’t mean it cannot be accessed by customers browsing the Internet. Actually, it can and it makes things even worse…
When people leave or even abandon your website because of a bad experience you may never have another chance to win them back. When people associate a bad experience with your brand, name or website address it will lead to lost sales and business in the end.
According to Stanford University research, 75 percent of users admit to making judgments about a company’s credibility based on their mobile website’s design.
It’s not only about prospects
And it’s not only about prospects and new visitors. By not having a fully responsive and mobile friendly website you can even lose your regular customers. If they are already thrilled with your products and services but encounter difficulties in accessing them by using their beloved iPhone… guess what. They browse back to Google and visit a website of your competition to begin a new experience with their company and their brand.
Nearly 8 out of every 10 consumers would stop engaging with a piece of content if it didn’t display well on the device they were using. (Adobe)
This way you are giving your clients away to your competition! Why? Because if they’re gone it’s very likely 88% of them will start the relationship with your competition and will never come back to your business again:
88% of consumers who search for a type of local business on a mobile device call or go to that business within 24 hours. (Google Mobile Movement Study)
This is definitely something you don’t want to do and yet another reason to adapt or create a mobile friendly website asap.
Mobile friendly website loads really fast
Loading time on mobile devices can also be a significant reason for your prospects and customer to leave your page. In fact, “loading time is a major contributing factor to page abandonment”. Visitors are very impatient, expect fast loading pages and every second counts.
If your website is loading very slowly due to too much content, inefficient programming code, lack of optimisation or errors you lose a lot of potential customers and clients just because of this. After 5 seconds of loading, you will lose over 25% of your audience!
The average time it takes to fully load a mobile landing page is 22 seconds, according to a new analysis. Yet 53% of visits are abandoned if a mobile site takes longer than three seconds to load. That’s a big problem. (Google)
And even if the design of your website is beautiful and mobile devices adapted, a lot of people won’t see it because they abandon it due the long loading time. Where will they go? To your competition of course.
How can Digital Marketing ruin your business if your website is not mobile friendly?
And there’s one more important thing I should mention about mobile friendly websites as a lot of businesses make this terrible mistake.
If you don’t have a mobile-friendly and fully responsive website but are investing in digital marketing at the same time – you should stop this immediately.
By investing in social media, SEO or other marketing activities in order to send prospects to your not mobile friendly website you waste your hard-earned budget as most people will leave it immediately. But not only that – you are also investing in sending more people to your website to form a negative opinion about your business and your brand. Such an approach can significantly hurt or even ruin your business. This way you invest in your business failure rather than success.
48% of users say that if they arrive on a business site that isn’t working well on mobile, they take it as an indication of the business simply not caring (“Source” research)
Fully responsive and mobile friendly website is the first step for your digital marketing world. And the internet is no different to any other media channel used to drive more leads to your business. If your website is not ready for mobile visitors, you’d better stop your other digital marketing efforts, before you adapt it, unless you’re ready to accumulate and stand the losses.
Go for mobile friendly website
Here are some of the benefits you will get by having a mobile friendly website:
- Increased accessibility (more traffic from mobile devices)
- Increased leads and sales
- Increased sales conversions
- Improved user experience
- Increased credibility and brand loyalty
- Increased customer retention
- Increased social sharing
- Improved SEO ranking
It’s a no brainer that these days every small business should adapt their website to be mobile friendly and fully responsive. And not only mobile friendly as “friendly” means “just ok”. It’s not enough to have a responsive WordPress-themed-one-size-fits-all website offered by most of the web design companies. Unfortunately, the vast majority of these websites are only partially responsive and very slow. These days you need to go one step further, something called “mobile first” – it’s inevitable if you want to be ahead of your competition.
To keep your current customers and win new ones you need to have a mobile friendly and fully responsive website that is displayed beautifully on every device. It has to create a great experience and provide outstanding usability to drive more leads and sales for your business. This is the only way to win your place in the fast changing market dominated by mobile devices. So, don’t wait, go mobile first and out-distance your competition!
What’s next
To check if your website is mobile friendly you can order a basic mobile friendliness audit. Such an audit should provide information about:
- Whether the website is mobile friendly in general
- Speed of your website
- Technical analysis
If your website is not mobile friendly you can ask a professional or digital agency about the costs of converting or redesigning your website to become mobile friendly. And yes, sometimes it can be much more cost effective and beneficial to recreate your website from scratch rather than improve the existing one.
Make sure you are using services of an agency that is not only technology driven. This is the problem with the majority of website design companies. They are great in the technological area of creating websites but do not have enough experience in making it effective and profitable on the marketing side.
Look for full-service digital agencies and companies that offer marketing and strategy services as well. They have more experience in creating websites that not only look great but also create a beautiful experience for your visitors and drive more sales to your business.
Small businesses go mobile friendly and responsive
SME Business Academy, in partnership with Brackets (results-driven digital agency), has created a special offer just for small businesses to help them transform their websites to become mobile friendly, fast and fully responsive. A quick turnaround is promised to help you adapt your website for the newest mobile requirements.
And the best thing is…
at a very affordable price you can utilize the experience and knowledge of marketing experts, designers, and developers who were involved in projects for companies like Western Union, Mercedes, Hewlett Packard and many more.
Just fill in the form below to receive:
- Professional mobile friendliness and speed audit of your website:
- General mobile friendliness analysis,
- Website speed insights,
- Technical code analysis including major and minor fails,
- Guidelines for mobile friendliness improvements.
- Quotation on how much it would cost to optimise, make a transition or redesign of your website to become mobile-friendly and fully responsive if needed.
- 3 business days turnaround.
Are you really sure your website is 100% mobile friendly? Order mobile friendliness audit conducted in partnership with Brackets (results-driven digital agency) and find out what you should improve for just £29 (£120 value).
SPECIAL OFFER
Fill the form to order your mobile friendliness audit
by Brackets – Digital Agency
for £120 £29
Jack Brzuz
With over 12 years of experience in Business, he positively impacted up to 1000 businesses with his training, consulting, international speaking and advice.
He's an active entrepreneur and business owner, he worked with Universal Music and owned a Music Distribution Business
Jack owns a Digital Agency (Brackets). He was involved in marketing campaigns for concerns such as Western Union, Mercedes, Ruuki, Hewlett Packard and numerous other well-known brands.
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