People are increasingly using mobile devices to browse the internet every year. Statista reported that in 2019, 53.3% of all global web traffic came on a mobile device. Just six years earlier, in 2013, that number was 16.2%.
This statistic alone shows how important mobile devices are to web traffic in general. What it doesn’t show, though, is how important it is that you optimize your website for mobile devices.
To discover why that is, you must dig a little deeper. Here are some ways that poor mobile optimization can affect your website.
It Makes You Harder to Find
If you want people to discover you online, you have to appear near the top of the most relevant web searches. To appear near the top of search engine results, you need to employ Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
This much you may already know. You may not know that not being optimized for mobile devices can harm your website’s SEO.
As of the end of 2018, Google was responsible for nearly all search traffic on mobile devices — 96% in all. In other words, if your website doesn’t resonate with Google’s search algorithms, you can forget about ranking highly.
Over the last seven years, Google has slowly but surely increased mobile optimization’s importance in its algorithms. Google analyzes whether a site is “mobile-friendly compliant” and how fast the site loads to determine its mobile search rankings. As of last year, Google now uses mobile-first indexing, which only uses a website’s mobile version to determine how relevant it is to a mobile search.
It Slows Down Your Page
Page speed isn’t just important for Google rankings. It’s also important to website visitors.
People today are very impatient. They aren’t going to wait around for your website to load. They expect it to load almost instantaneously, especially on mobile devices.
Almost half of all web users expect that websites will load in two seconds or faster. If your site takes more than three seconds to load up, roughly 40% of visitors will abandon your site.
Generally speaking, websites that load faster are the ones that perform better among visitors on mobile devices. Those that take longer to load are the ones that visitors abandon.
It Makes You Look Like an Amateur
Part of the reason you have a website is to make you look professional. When your website is poorly optimized for mobile devices, it makes you look like an amateur.
People expect that the websites they visit will automatically adjust to the specific mobile device they’re using. If they’re browsing the internet on an iPhone, for example, they expect websites to be laid out to maximize the experience for that specific model of iPhone and version of the operating system.
Your webpage should fit into each mobile device’s screen and not require visitors to scroll left or right to see an entire page. Visitors shouldn’t have to zoom in to read the content on your website.
If your website doesn’t do all these things, visitors will not take you seriously.
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