Did you know, 90% of business do not have a mobile-friendly website!?
According to a recent survey, 97% of consumers use online media to shop locally and yet, according to Yodle, 90% of small business owners do not have a mobile-friendly website while 48% do not even have a website.
"A majority of small business owners don’t have a website (52%) or a mobile-optimized website (90%)." - Yodle
If you are one of these small business owners, it's time to Stop Procrastinating! To stay ahead of the competition, your business not only needs a website, it needs to be professionally designed and mobile-optimized.
Here at Cancian Digital, we make it our duty to make sure all our websites are optimized beautifully for mobile devices!
If your website isn't optimized to display correctly on mobile or other types of devices may end up costing you! Smart phones are now the more dominant way people absorb digital content and Google will actually lower your search result rankings if your site doesn't meet the mobile friendly requirements. All of our sites come with full Mobile and Device Optimization, so you don't need to worry about it! We got you covered!
The Industry Standard that's Still Being Considered Optional
The general public are still cloudy on responsive design’s definition and its advantages.
The internet is still littered with non-responsive websites.
And news of Google’s upcoming mobile-first algorithm changes have failed to rein in the millions of webmasters whose websites have been and will continue to be relentlessly walloped in search rankings.
What is Responsive Web Design?
In order to understand responsive websites, it’s important to first know the difference between them and their inferior—and annoying—older brother: Mobile-friendly websites.
Mobile Friendly Websites
Essentially, a mobile friendly website is a website that is designed to function on a phone or tablet.
The key word here is “function.”
Responsive websites
Google defines responsive web design as follows:
“Responsive web design (RWD) is a setup where the server always sends the same HTML code to all devices and CSS is used to alter the rendering of the page on the device. Google’s algorithms should be able to automatically detect this setup if all Googlebot user agents are allowed to crawl the page and its assets (CSS, JavaScript, and images). Responsive design serves all devices with the same code that adjusts for screen size.” Now that you "understand" (cos seriously we barely understood half of that) what responsive design is, let’s explore the sweeping benefits of responsive web design and the disadvantages of websites that are not responsive.
Mobile traffic as a share of total global online traffic in 2018 is 52.64%
What it means:
Statista has found that mobile traffic globally has a larger share of internet usage than desktop traffic.
Actually, mobile traffic has been ahead since 2015.
These figures are increasing year over year, causing websites that are not responsive to lose progressively larger portions of their audience.
Ask any company if they would like to more than double their website traffic. It’s probably a good bet they will say yes
Mobile devices are projected to reach 79% of global internet use by the end of 2019
If #1 wasn’t convincing enough, research shows that mobile internet usage is projected to skyrocket in the coming year.
It’s compelling that even companies that pride themselves on building great computers are targeting younger demographics and alluding to a world where the computer industry is ripe for disruption.
When Apple does something like this, it’s worth paying attention.
In 2017, mobile eCommerce revenue accounts for 50% of total eCommerce revenue
50% of eCommerce revenue is already happening on mobile devices.
It logically follows that with the projected increase in overall mobile share of internet traffic that this number will go up as well.
In fact many retailers are already known for their great mobile shopping experience and others are making significant improvements to theirs.
Those who are not may cease to exist in the near future.
57% of internet users say they won’t recommend a business with a poorly designed website on mobile
Ok, so here’s where responsive web design comes into play:
Websites that are not mobile responsive are by nature poorly designed, because they don’t provide an optimal user experience.
No company wants its website visitors to be wary of referring them.
Nearly 8 in 10 customers would stop engaging with content that doesn’t display well on their device
All the traffic in the world doesn’t matter if a website isn’t ready to give that traffic what it’s looking for.
A website that requires pinching and zooming is no longer just a small inconvenience to its users, it’s an automatic “no.”
While responsive design is not yet featured on as many websites as it should be, it’s still out there—and users will search until they find it rather than settling for a bad website.
According to Google, 61% of users are unlikely to return to a site on mobile if they had trouble accessing it and 40% visit a competitor’s site instead
Accessibility lies at the heart of responsive design.
Websites that are difficult to navigate provide poor accessibility which leads users to seek out alternative options.
88% of consumers who search for a type of business on a mobile device call or go to that business within 24 hours
Let’s say you’re on the road and your car breaks down, or you’re at dinner with a friend and want to find a new, exciting place for dessert.
What do these two situations have in common:
1. You’re going to use the internet to find an idea or solution
2. You don’t have a computer on you
Although over half of web traffic is happening on mobile devices, the mobile experience is even more powerful in the local business scene.
Local businesses have extremely high potential for traffic from people on the go.
Only 17% of small businesses who have a website have a site that's mobile friendly
Seriously?
Most businesses don't even have sites that are mobile friendly, which we’ve been trash talking this entire time?
Tisk tisk.
The implications of this, particularly for small businesses are staggering!
Jumping in front of that 83+% of businesses without responsive websites can be an incredible advantage if we take into account all of the traffic statistics listed above and the trajectory of mobile web traffic moving forward.
According to Moz:
“In a mobile-only world, the relevance of local search is even higher.”
The future is bright for early adopters, and apparently, it’s still possible to become an early adopter.
Google’s upcoming mobile-first updates
Something big is in the works, and it’s less of an armageddon and more of a new beginning [Mobile-First Indexing is officially live as of March 26th, 2018!
One of the major premises of Mobilegeddon was that Google was going to establish a separate mobile index for search results. This tactic was used to differentiate mobile friendly sites from non-mobile friendly ones, but also to label mobile friendly sites as such in search results.
In November of 2016, Google introduced the concept of mobile-first indexing (and it is now officially live, as of March 26th, 2018).
The premise of mobile-first indexing is that the mobile index created by Google in 2015 will eventually take the place of the desktop index currently in place.
So what does this mean?
Well, first of all, it means Google is paying attention to the same statistics we are:
They understand that mobile traffic has overtaken desktop traffic and that internet users prioritize the mobile experience. They recognize that if internet users care more about a high quality mobile experience, the internet needs to put mobile first.
According to Moz,
“Google is steadily moving to a mobile-only world. Mobile-first indexing seems like the inevitable consequence of a year (or more) almost exclusively dedicated to evangelizing and forcing a change of mindset from desktop to mobile.”
TL;DR: Google has been paying attention to all of the statistics you’ve read about in this post. They are reacting by completely flipping the script on how the internet is experienced by the average user. The mobile experience will soon take precedent.
Don’t get left behind.
