Benefits of Mobile Responsive Websites
In this day and age, almost everyone has access to smartphones and other mobile devices, and are regularly browsing the internet with these devices. It is important to cater to this large audience when designing your website. In this blog, I will highlight the benefits of having a mobile responsive website and the importance of responsive web design.
Traffic
Ever since 2015, the majority of searches on Google have been conducted by mobile devices. This has only risen since, reaching around 60% in 2016. This isn’t just a large audience you need to cater to, it’s now the majority audience. Even if your industry isn’t mobile-focused, a large base of your target audience will be using mobile devices. Therefore it is important to ensure your online presence is mobile responsive, otherwise, you’ll simply miss out on a ton of opportunities to convert new customers.
Maintenance
Before responsive web design, many websites would utilise subdomains to serve mobile-versions of their website or even have a separate website altogether for mobile devices. This meant you would effectively have at least two websites to maintain, each with their own set of problems, fixes and required maintenance. There was also a range of other issues. For instance, the mobile version would have different content to the desktop website – it was commonplace for mobile versions to just be a stripped-down version of the desktop website – which massively impacted the SEO for mobile. With responsive web design, you are just on one website, one domain, which automatically adjusts itself according to the user’s device and screen to make itself mobile responsive.
SEO
As discussed in our first point, the majority of searches on Google are now from mobile devices. Over the past few years, Google has pushed some major updates which reflects the new importance of mobile traffic. The first major update was dubbed ‘Mobilegeddon’ which gave a boost to mobile responsive websites and a penalty to websites which weren’t mobile-friendly. As the name suggests, this was seen as quite a huge change and many websites weren’t mobile responsive when the update was announced. Updates like this are what eventually phased out the old practice of using subdomains for mobile websites.
Another major Google update with this mobile-focus is mobile-first indexing. With this update, Google prefers to index the mobile version of your website rather than the desktop version. This is where responsive web design shows its brilliance: Google pushes a major algorithm update and you don’t have to worry about anything! With responsive web design, the SEO aspects of your website such as content are kept the same between mobile and desktop – therefore it doesn’t matter which one is indexed. The websites which will be affected by this change are those which made major changes – especially content cuts – to their mobile website.
Blue Whale Media
At Blue Whale Media, all of our websites are designed to be mobile responsive. Whether you have an old website that needs to be brought up to speed or need a brand new website altogether, we’re here for you! Read about our web design service online or call us on 01925 552050!
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