The importance of mobile (Updated 2025)

Even then, mobile traffic is too big to ignore—and Google still evaluates mobile experience. It’s smart to ensure both are great.

Not necessarily. Today we mostly adapt to screen width and capabilities, not specific devices. In some cases (like very heavy components), the server can help by sending lighter versions to small screens.

You've probably heard a lot about how important having a mobile website or mobile presence is. In this presentation, we're going to look at why it's so important to have a mobile website. First and foremost, Google has recommended a mobile-first strategy, meaning designing your website from the mobile experience up to a tablet, then up to a desktop computer, so really understanding what your website is going to look like on a handheld or mobile device. More people are searching on mobile phones than on a computer

now for local services as well as products and just doing product research. So if you're going to buy a big screen TV, for example, you may go to your mobile device first to do a little bit of research before either purchasing online or then heading into a brick and mortar store to purchase that television. Statistics show that people are five times more likely to leave a site that isn't mobile-friendly, so if from the search engine results page, you click on a website and you find it is not mobile-friendly, you're more likely, you're five times more likely, to leave that

site and abandon it to attempt to find a site that is optimized for mobile viewing experience. And now, as of a year ago, so as of March of 2015, search engine results are tied to your mobile-friendliness. So if you see in the example that we have on the screen here, you may have noticed in Google's search engine results, if you're browsing on a mobile device, you may notice that some of the results now have this Mobile-Friendly tag, and that indicates that this, this website you're about to click on is

optimized and is, is mobile-friendly, so it's optimized for your handheld device. Google is giving preference to sites that are mobile-optimized, so if you are searching on a handheld or mobile device, you're going to see a site that is mobile-friendly first. The two screenshots that I have, or the two graphics that I have showing on my screen here on the right-hand side simply sho- show, one, the top one is that single platform users' share of the tota- total digital population, and what that means is, the blue line that's kind of trending

downwards is people who only have desktop devices, so those people who are only accessing the internet via a desktop device. And you'll see that as of March of 2015, those numbers have... the, the red line is mobile-only, the red line has finally overtaken the blue line, which means that the number of single platform users, so people who only access the internet via a single device, that for the first time ever, mobile devices have taken over desktop devices. So that's why if you don't yet have a mobile strategy, if your website is not yet mobile-optimized,

it's a really good idea to make this a priority for your website in the very near future. You are, like we're indicating here, you are losing out on search engine traffic, and it's just creating a poor user experience for the people that are visiting your website. The other bar chart I have on the screen here just shows if... the frequency of website... of mobile website issues, so 9%, uh, people are saying they often have website issues on a handheld device. 27% say sometimes, 20% say rarely, and 18% say never. So this just indicates w- kind of where

we're at right now with mobile, with mobile websites. It, it is something that people are trying, but not yet everyone has mastered the mobile experience, which is why it's important to understand the types of mobile sites that you have available. We kind of break this down into three categories. The first is creating an app, which actually isn't a mobile website, but it's an option of, of creating a, an application to be able to access items, uh, that, that are specific to your company. So it could be a, a version of your website that you've created into an application for people to have access

to, but the importance or, or the difference between an app and a mobile website is typically, an app is accessed from the, the dashboard of the handheld device, and it can be used online or offline, so some of that data can be cached and stored onto the mobile device. Creating an app is, is pretty involved, and you typically would have to create an app for each device, so, uh, for an Android device and for an Apple device or the iOS platform. So you would have to create two different versions of the apps and somehow make it available, so either get it into,

uh, the Google Play store or into the, into the App Store to make it so that people can find your app and download it to their device. So an app is one way that you can access your website on a mobile device. Probably not the most popular way that business owners are using it, but if you do have a, a need for an app, um, just kinda make sure that you understand how the user will be using that application and why it would be different than just a mobile website. The second option is a mobile website, and this can be considered an adaptive solution. So the mobile

website is... it can be one of two different things, really. It can be a completely separate website, so it can be... you, you may even have noticed that a website could have a separate, um, instead of .com, it could be .mobi on your mobile device, or you could see it in a subdomain to where it's mobile dot your domain name.com, for example. So that's indicating that when you went to that website on your handheld device or on your mobile phone, the website understood and recognized that you were coming from a handheld device, and it showed you the mobile website

as opposed to the desktop site. So if you were to go to that same website on your computer, it would show you the desktop version, but when you go to it on a handheld device, it shows you the mobile version. Now, on a mobile website, you have potentially two different websites to maintain, so you're maintaining the desktop site, and you're maintaining the mobile site. This can be good or bad depending on what you want to show on the mobile site. So if you have a really huge, you know, website that you have a ton of content on, and you've looked at the analytics, and you realize that people on a mobile

device are really only coming to your site to do three different things, maybe they're purchasing, maybe they're searching your product catalog, and maybe they're reading your blog, those are the three things that, that mobile users are, are doing. On a mobile site, you can choose to only put that content on the site and maybe ignore the rest of the content, so you're not having to, um, maybe load down the, the user experience on the mobile device by putting up all of your content on the page. You're picking and choosing which content you want to appear on the mobile site versus the desktop site. So that would be a

mobile site. Again, the potential downside of having the mobile site...... could be that you're making updates to two different sites. So you can- if your address changes, you're gonna have to go and change it on the desktop site, and you're gonna have to go change it on the mobile site. The third type of site that we look at is a responsive site. Now a responsive site adjusts automatically to the user's viewport. So if they're looking on a handheld device, it's going to be a smaller version of what they're going to see on a desktop device, and the content may rearrange itself to where, you know, if on the desktop,

d- on the desktop you're seeing two columns, um, two columns of content and maybe a graphic on the right-hand side, when you reduce your viewport down to a mobile device, you might see a single column and the graphic might be at the bottom as opposed to being on the right-hand side. So it kind of expands and contracts based on how big the user's viewport is. So respon- that's, that's a responsive site. It's, it uses all of the same text, all of the same content that you see on the desktop is also available on the, on the mobile because it just kind of rearranges to fit the screen.

Now the one potential downside with a responsive site is if you load a large graphic, for example, into your, your desktop site, if you have a large header graphic at the top, that's going to be automatically scaled down to fit a mobile device. Now, it's not going to change the size of the file, so if it, if the file you've uploaded is two megabytes, now on your handheld device you're also having to load a two megabyte file. In a future video, we're going to talk about resizing images for the web, and we wouldn't suggest that you put

up a two megabyte file. Um, there are ways you can keep the, the large size, the large dimensions, but reduce the file size. So we'll talk about that in a future video. But just, so keep that in mind, on a responsive site, the graphic is going to be the same graphic as what you've loaded into the main site unless you have code to go in and change that, but typically it's going to be the same graphic on the desktop site as it is just kind of a, a reduced down and scrunched down version of it on a handheld site. So the size, the, the physical, or the size of the, the file is still the same, still a large

file and could take a longer time to load on a mobile device. So just something to keep in mind. If you're not clear on whether your website is mobile-friendly or not, there, Google has made it very easy to, well actually two different tools, to, to make it easy for you to go in and test to see if your site is mobile or not. I will link these up in the email that this goes out in, or you can just copy and paste the, or not copy, the, the re-type the URLs from the screen here into your browser, um, and access the test. The first one is testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com,

and I'll show you results for that on the next screen. The results that you're seeing on the screen right now are actually from the second tester, which is google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly. And what you're seeing on the screen right now is I ran a quick test for microsoft.com. I assumed that they would have a mobile-friendly website, and yes indeed they do. It says, "Awesome! This page is mobile friendly," and then it gives you just some key points, like, it, it's the, the viewport has been sized for the device, the buttons are, are big enough to tap on with your finger, so it just gives you

some ideas of the things you're doing correctly. Now on this next screen and the last screen we're going to look at is the testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com, also for Microsoft, and tells us, yes, this site scores a good score for mobile friendliness. It scores a poor (laughs) score for mobile speed and a fair score for desktop speed, so 56 out of 100 for mobile speed and 70 out of 100 for desktop speed. So this is kind of just a larger indication on how Google is reading your site. So it is mobile-friendly, but it's not as fast

for both the mobile and desktop as what Google would like to see. If we were actually looking at this report, we could scroll down and see a couple of the suggestions that Google makes in order to speed up the website for mobile and for desktop. But I wanted to throw in Microsoft's website as an example here because I'm assuming that after you watch this video, you're probably going to go test your website, and I didn't want you to be alarmed when you saw that your site wasn't a 100 out of a 100 for all of those across the board. So even if you have a mobile-friendly website, like most of our clients do,

you're going to see that maybe you score a 90 out of 100 for mobile friendliness and maybe your mobile speed isn't what it, isn't what it, you know, the, a 100 out of a 100. Well, neither is Microsoft's, so let's keep this in perspective. I'm guessing google.com is very fast because they have, you know, not a lot of content on their site at all. They have a search bar. So any site that has a, a bit of content, that has some graphics that have to load on a page, it's going to be a little bit slower than just a lightning fast google.com. Um, so just keep that in mind if you go out and do test your site, that, yes, take their suggestions

into consideration, and if there's things you can do to speed up your site, you certainly should, especially if it's things like the graphics are really large and they could be optimized. Um, that's one very easy thing to be able to go in and change on your site is to reduce the size of the graphics. Um, so if it's something like that, then yes, for sure, take that into consideration, and maybe go in and make those changes. But just wanted to warn you that you might not see a perfect score across the board, and that is not necessarily a bad thing. It simply shows that there is some room for improvement, and it will give you some suggestions on how to do it. As always,

if you need help implementing those changes, you can give us a call and we'd be happy to walk you through those changes.