Why Having a Mobile-Friendly Website is Important

Why having a mobile-friendly website is important

It’s no big secret that we’re using our mobiles and tablets for browsing and purchasing from websites more than ever!

While having a mobile-friendly site may seem like old news, you may not know all of the reasons why it will increase your traffic and, ultimately, your sales.

 

Does Google prioritise mobile-friendly websites?

Since July 2018, Google has prioritised mobile page load speed as a key metric when deciding on a site’s search result ranking. If your mobile site is slow or unresponsive, it will have an overall impact on rankings across all devices. 

Let’s not forget, Google is responsible for about 94% of total organic search traffic worldwide, meaning investing in optimising your website is a must! 

If you are new to working on your company’s website, you can also check on Google’s bespoke program to see whether your site is mobile-friendly or not. 

 

Creating the perfect e-commerce experience for customers

Here at Netbiz, one of the e-commerce platforms we use is Magento 2, creating mobile-friendly sites that also provide a smooth selling experience for clients and their customers.

In terms of payment methods, Magento 2 offers credit/debit card, Apple Pay, Amazon Pay and PayPal, giving your customers a variety of choices when they have decided what to buy. 

Magento has also vastly improved the checkout procedure, shaving time off when making a purchase. This helps to generate return customers plus attract new ones. 

Magento 2 also seamlessly integrates with Google Analytics, allowing the use of a new tracking code that improves data collection and monitoring. This is the easiest way to track user behaviour on mobile devices.

 

The perfect destination for PPC customers

Having a particular landing page for your pay-per-click customers is the best method of ensuring your paid campaigns reach their goals. 

More and more businesses are turning to a mix of social media paid adverts and Google Ads, to help get their products in front of their target audience. 

A bespoke page or a tightly keyword optimised product/services page will help strike the balance between relevant information, call to action and easy purchasing options. 

This page can also include options such as customer testimonials, product reviews plus any relevant certifications to reaffirm the established trust in your brand from previous customers.

 

What are Accelerated Mobile Pages? 

Now for the techy part!

Google’s mobile first indexing has made how your website is found more important than ever before. Further incentivising the need for webmasters to implement fully mobile responsive designs which can be personalised for any device. 

Google has attempted to make this transition more straightforward by creating fast and mobile-friendly webpages known as Accelerated Mobile Pages, distinguished by a lightning bolt symbol in mobile search results.

Accelerated mobile pages (AMPs) are essentially stripped down HTML copies of existing webpage content that gives you faster load times than standard HTML5 documents. Websites can serve AMP pages by implementing the rel-amphtml tag into their HTML.

 

Each page that has an AMP code will contain a 3 step AMP configuration –

HTML – A stripped down and unique mark-up of traditional HTML code with unique tags.

JS – This is used to gather resources and strip them down to eliminate unnecessary rendering.

CDN – An optimised network designed to cache pages and adapt them to AMP code immediately.

Accelerated mobile pages also reduce the needs for additional CSS requests and eliminate certain onpage elements, such as bulky pictures, backend code and too many calls to action, which increases the speed of the site. 

Primarily, AMP speeds up your site’s load time and Google leverages this functionality by preloading AMP documents using a single iFrame in the background of search results page so that pages appear to load instantly. 

 

Don’t become a digital dinosaur!

Your business needs to be seen as modern and relevant, and if your site’s mobile experience isn’t up to scratch you will look like a digital dinosaur!

On the other hand, a contemporary, cutting-edge site will help convince any smartphone users you are the only choice for the products they want.

If you need some inspiration, take a look at our work on Lace and Favour, the UK’S favourite wedding boutique store. 

If you have read this blog and think your website needs a bit of touch up work, contact a member of our fantastic Account Management team for an informal chat. Speak to us about Website Design Stoke on Trent to get your website up-to-date!