Over the past few years, we have been doing our best to convince new and potential clients that they need to make the switch to a responsive web design that’s compatible with mobile devices. After all, more than 50% of all web traffic now comes from smartphones and tablets, and Google recently started factoring mobile functionality into its search algorithms. Additionally, 93% of people who use a mobile device for research go on to make a purchase.
Despite these facts, we occasionally run into business owners who tell us they don’t really need their websites to be mobile-friendly because they don’t have customers who use iPads, Androids, or other similar devices. We try to explain to them that this is a chicken-and-egg problem; if you don’t have mobile customers, it’s probably because your site isn’t mobile-ready.
Sometimes, they fail to see the logic in this. What they don’t necessarily understand, is that mobile buyers are easy to miss if you aren’t looking for them. Let us explain with a few quick points…
You Can’t Count the Customers You Don’t See
If someone comes to your website using a mobile device and it doesn’t load or display correctly, they are likely to leave without ever contacting you or taking any further action. Unless you happen to be looking very closely at your web analytics package, you aren’t likely to notice that you missed out on an opportunity. And so, you come to the conclusion that you “don’t have any mobile customers”.
To put this another way, people don’t contact you to say they decided to go with another company or vendor. It’s one thing to watch someone walk into your store, look around, and then leave. Online, though, they simply click away and it’s difficult for you to figure out why.
Mobile Users Are Everywhere
As we’ve already pointed out, mobile users are now the majority online. There are more men and women using phones and tablets to visit websites than there are people accessing the web through traditional laptop and desktop computers. Those details suggest that more than half of your customers are coming to you through mobile devices, as well.
Even if you don’t want to take our word for it that mobile accessibility is a big deal, the numbers tell a much different story. Why would you risk losing more than half of your potential business just to put off an upgrade to your website?
Getting Mobile-Ready Is Easier Than You Think
Some clients assume adding responsive functionality to a website will be an expensive, drawn out process. That’s not really the case. Although there is some work involved in changing the underlying code associated with a design, the costs and delays tend to be very minimal.
In other words, you could be getting a much better website – and targeting a larger segment of your market – simply by letting us make a few changes to the pages you already have, or including responsive web design with other improvements you’ve been thinking about making.
There are millions of customers out there waiting for you to improve your web design so they can come to you through mobile devices, and very few good reasons to put it off any longer. Why not call our team today and see how easy it is to get started?