By now, you probably know that people use their phones for more than just calls. Mobile phones are used to search the Internet and surf the web for everything from driving directions, to shopper price comparisons, to browsing restaurant menus! What you may not know is that the version of your website that visitors see while using their mobile device may not appear exactly as it does with a normal computer and monitor.
Did your heart just skip a beat?
Don’t worry. Although some devices, (including the Blackberry), don’t always render a website as it was designed to be shown, for the most part today’s advanced mobile devices (iPhone and Android included) will display your website just fine! Even if you don’t have an iPhone, you can check your site looks on a mobile phone simply by going to a site like http://iphonetester.com/ and entering your domain.
If your site looks okay, should you not be worried? Or if your site looks horrible, should you drop everything and address the situation? Begin by looking at your website stats. Many stats programs now offer a breakout of mobile user stats, making it easy to see if people are visiting your site from a mobile device, what they visit and if they like what they find.
- Let’s say your site looks good on all mobile devices. That’s great! But what if your stats say that 100% of your mobile traffic exits the site within 5 seconds? That means they aren’t finding what they need to find. In that case you may be interested in developing a mobile version of your site. This is a streamlined version of your website with more direct and obvious paths to the information that these visitors really want.
- What if your site looks awful on every device, but your stats say that you have no mobile traffic? You may be in an industry where mobile traffic isn’t a huge factor, so you may be able to hold off addressing for a while (but you should put it on the To Do list down the road).
One thing to keep in mind is that mobile devices only get so much bandwidth. If your website has large files pulling into a page (think images), the page may be very slow loading leading site visitors to leave the site before they see what you want them to see. This may be another reason to either rethink your current website or start talking about developing a mobile version of the site.
Did you check out how your website looks on any mobile device? Did you like what you see? Do you have any new ideas? Let us know your thoughts.
