Almost all websites should be mobile friendly now, and the easiest way to make your website mobile friendly is to use a responsive website design.  Responsive designs use some clever css (cascading style sheets) code that tells your browser to move parts of the webpage around and resize them, depending on the size of the viewing screen.

Two thirds of people now use a smartphone, and five out of four of them use their smartphone to search the internet. These people are spending on average 2 hours a day on their mobile device. People browsing on their mobiles are 3 times more likely to convert on your website, with 70% of mobile lead searches leading to an online action within an hour. Online shoppers are 67% more likely to buy from a website that’s mobile friendly, and 62% of businesses that switched to a responsive website design reported increased sales. It’s important to note that Google recently updated their search algorithm for mobile devices, to eliminate any websites that were not mobile friendly from the search results.

If your business doesn’t have a responsive or mobile friendly website you could be missing out on a significant number of sales. Fortunately, switching to a responsive design is usually easy. If your website is using WordPress there are free responsive templates available that you can use. If you want a professional design it’s still very straightforward, and most good web designers will be able to help you. The same to the other major CMS like Drupal and Joomla, and to e-commerce platforms like Magento.

You can check how mobile friendly Google thinks your website is by logging into the Google search console and selecting ‘Search Traffic > Mobile Usability’ from the left hand menu. You can also look at Google PageSpeed Insights tools, this measures your websites performance and a few key usability metrics.


Why you need a responsive web design

This graphic was created by Go-Gulf.