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Mobile friendly Website – The most important in a nutshell |
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In 2023, around 5.18 billion people in the world used the internet – this corresponds to 65% of the world’s population. More than 55% of internet accesses were made via mobile phones. The desktop is in second place with 43%, while the tablet is clearly behind with just under 2%.
So if anyone should still be asking whether a website really has to be mobile-friendly – or responsive – the answer is probably a resounding “Yes! But apart from this obvious reason, what other advantages are there to responsive websites?
You have probably heard the terms “responsive” or “mobile-friendly” before. But what exactly is behind them? Or what is the difference?
The term mobile-friendly simply means that a website is well presented for mobile use. However, the term does not describe how this is implemented. For example, there are still many websites that offer a separate mobile version on a subdomain, which then looks like this:
The use of a mobile version on a subdomain is mobile-friendly, but no longer up-to-date. With responsive design, on the other hand, there is no subdomain and no separate mobile version. Here, the layout of the website automatically adapts to the size of the browser window. In principle, responsive design is an optimal way to implement mobile-friendliness.
A website with Responsive Design flexibly adapts to the size of the browser
Mobile-friendliness is no longer “nice to have”, but simply necessary if you want your website to be found online. Why? – There are simple reasons:
It is undisputed that SEO is a big factor when it comes to the success of one’s own website. Anyone who does not at least appear on the first page of the search results rarely gets clicks on their page. But since 2019, Google has taken into account not only the “classic” SEO factors such as page content, click duration and dwell rate, but also whether the page is responsive and thus functional via mobile devices. No wonder: in 2019, 65% of all Google search queries came from a mobile device, and this value has probably increased by a few percentage points in the meantime.
Since 2021, Google not only values mobile-friendliness as a positive factor when calculating rankings – but Google switched to “mobile-first indexing”. This means that Google no longer uses the desktop version of a website to calculate rankings, but only the mobile version. This makes mobile-friendliness almost existentially important for everyone who wants to be found in the organic Google search results.
A 2016 study found that today 73% of millennials are involved in B2B decision-making and 33% even make these decisions alone. The crucial point here is that millennials have grown up as digital natives.
A responsive website is much more important for this target group than it is for Generation X or the Baby Boomers. To back this up with figures: 82% of Millennials consider mobile devices important for research. If you fail this target group with a non-responsive website, you could get fewer orders in the future and thus put your company’s success at risk.
There are studies that have examined the connection between bounce rate and responsive design. The result is clear: visitors who come to your website will only stay if the loading time of the website is short and the readability is good. If the user first has to zoom into the website with two fingers in order to recognise some of your content, not only is the probability that he will do so very low – he will also not come back.
Potential customers are not the only users you will find on your website. You will probably get to the point where you are looking for employees – and this is why you need a good image. With the baby boomers retiring from the workforce in the next few years, employee acquisition will become even more important. Big difference: more and more young job seekers are now entering the market. And it is precisely for this target group, which was virtually born with a mobile phone in its hand, that mobile design is extremely important.
Responsive design is an important part of a successful external presentation; after all, nowadays the website has the same function as a business card. If you have missed the changeover so far, now is the right time to tackle this project!
While web design started with desktop computers and now extends to mobile phones and tablets, this is far from the end. In the future, more and more devices will be equipped with displays and be able to access the internet via the WLAN – from refrigerators to smart watches. This means a greater number of different screen formats and thus an even greater compulsion to design websites responsively.
Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test: You want to test whether your page is displayed correctly on mobile devices? Google provides a tool for this purpose. Here you simply enter your URL and then find out whether Google detects problems with the mobile-friendliness of your website.
Test for optimization for mobile devices
In principle, there are three ways to make your website mobile-friendly:
Again, this shows: The best solution is a responsive design. The easiest way to realise this is with a content management system such as WordPress – even without programming knowledge, a mobile-friendly & responsive website can be designed quite quickly.
