To Mobilize or Not to Mobilize, that is the question. Well the answer is categorically YES, you do need a mobile version of your website.
Here at the home of San Antonio Website Design we run some very large, very busy websites. Lets take a look at some specific numbers.
The largest and busiest vet website in San Antonio is the Becker Animal Hospital website. And guess what? They get 21% of all their visits through mobile devices.
Another busy website (over 20,000 visits a month) is a health website we manage specializing in Candida overgrowths and how to address them. This is a website where you would expect people to be doing more serious research from laptops or desktops, but in fact this website gets 15% of it’s traffic on mobile devices and this percentage is steadily climbing.
A large dental office here in San Antonio is getting 17% of all its traffic on mobile devices.
These are not vague general statistics, these are real business people with real websites and they are seeing 15% to 20% of their website traffic coming in on mobile devices.
Recently I wrote about the importance of eye trail in website design in my post Website Design Basics. Well this becomes much more important when considering the 4 inch screen on a mobile device. What happens?
- The website takes forever to load. Even with 3G and now 4G, trying to load a full size website across a mobile line is noticeably slower than a regular line. Will your prospective customer sit and wait?
- Trying to view a normal website is that the user is scrolling all over the place trying to read information and the phone number and contact information is almost impossible to see. One again, will your user sit scroll through your now confusing website layout? Or will they move on?
Internet use is all about speed. You want to know what movies are out? A second or two later you are looking at them. You want to find a good restaurant? A second or two later you are reading the reviews. Internet users are on the internet because they want to move fast and get information quickly. If they wanted to go slow, they would shuffle through the yellow pages. So rather than ask the question “Do I need a mobile version of my website”, instead ask yourself “Can I afford to blow off 15% to 20% of my new business?” My company does a lot of San Antonio website design projects and one for one we create mobile versions of our websites.
Please contact me if you would like a website design consultation.