Did you know that 60% of website views comes from cell phones, or that Google has adopted a mobile first search engine, so that it prioritizes its results for mobile searchers and mobile responsive websites that properly display on mobile devices? In fact, 4.8 billion folks own a smartphone. As a matter of fact, 3 out of 5 people search for local services from their Smart Phone, and that the bounce rate for non-responsive sites is over 80%.
The first step is test your site to see if it is mobile optimized? You may think the easiest way to do this is to just open your site on your cell phone and tablet. However, every mobile device displays just a little bit differently. Just because you can ‘see’ your website on a mobile device, does not mean it’s optimized for mobile. If you must enlarge the screen, or swipe back and forth to read text, it’s not mobile optimized. As such, I recommend you use a responsive web design testing tool. Google Chrome supports a free responsive tester at https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/responsive-web-design-tes/bdpelkpfhjfiacjeobkhlkkgaphbobea?hl=en-US. With this tool, you can test of almost any cell phone or tablet. This comes in especially handy if you have good analytics and a large portion of your visitors are using a particular type of phone, so that you can optimize your design to most of your potential customers.
You next want to use Google’s own the Mobile-Friendly Test tool, which will tell you if Google thinks your site is mobile friendly. if your site isn’t mobile-friendly, the results will show you what technical changes need to be made to bring your site into compliance. The second part of mobile responsiveness is to ensure you site loads fast. You can use a free site speed tool at https://gtmetrix.com which will tell you how fast your site loads and if it does not load quickly, it will give you technical changes you can make to your programming and or work with your hosting company and content delivery network. This may also include reducing the file size of your images, or even having your server scale them. You may need to minimize your JavaScript or .CSS files. You may need to add caching to your site so that the whole site does not need to reload every time. There are all things that a good developer can help you with if you feel out of your element, and if you are using WordPress, there are many plugins that will do about 80% of this for you for under $60 and many plugins are even free.
We now live in a mobile-first world, and Google recognizes this, so you really need to be sure your site is optimized for customers finding you and interacting with your site on their cell phones.
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