Are you Updated for Mobile Friendliness?

The rise of mobile usage certainly shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. In this day and age, mobile devices are attached to almost every person as if it were their favorite teddy bear or blanket. Businesses should be taking advantage of this new market and optimize their websites to be mobile-friendly. If your business hasn’t yet been proactive in this endeavor, you will want to soon hop on board. Google is now in the process of rolling out a mobile-friendly algorithm and if you aren’t optimized, you could lose visibility on mobile search results. That could mean bad news for your business and a drop in rankings. 

You may be wondering if all this fuss is really necessary. Perhaps you’re thinking that mobile usage is just a trend and it will fade away eventually. We hate to break it to you, but that is strictly wishful thinking on your part. A recent study found that in an average week, consumers spend 15+ hours researching using their smartphones. A large majority of users are using their mobile devices to make purchases  and use their phones over a PC to look up information. This is a huge percentage of people that could be missing you completely because you aren’t up to date. 

In order to start making your website more mobile friendly, it’s best to avoid these common mistakes:

• A page where the text, links, and other content are too small to read and you have to scroll sideways or zoom in to properly read the content
• Slow loading pages
• Using software or content that is blocked on mobile devices such as JavaScript or pages that require flash
• Call-to-actions that are too large or take up the whole page
• Linking mobile users to desktop URLs
• Having too many pop-ups. This can be very frustrating to the mobile user when trying to close the tiny windows. 
• Too many click-through pages

If you would like to find out just how mobile friendly your website is, you can read up on Google’s mobile-friendly criteria and guidelines. You can also test whether your website passes the necessary criteria in order to be mobile-friendly. It is a lot of work to have to optimize for mobile and desktop, but remember, you have to keep your customers in mind. It’s in your best interest to have the information accessible across various mediums in order to attract and keep your customers.