Is Your B2B Website Mobile Friendly?

If you’ve had your website for awhile, and you think it’s working just fine, it’s time to view it on your mobile phone. It’s most likely how more than 50% of clients find you on mobile devices and are making judgments about your company there.

“In 2018, 52.2% of all website traffic worldwide was generated through mobile phones, up from 50.3% in the previous year. Mobile currently accounts for half of all global web pages served,” from research compiled by statista.com.

• Mobile usage up: In 2018, mobile use took the lead over desktop.
• B2B research use: A recent Google study reports that 42% of B2B researchers use their mobile phones while researching purchases. And 49% do so while at work.
• Design matters: A Stanford study showed that 75% of users make judgements about a company’s credibility based on the visual design of its website.

Therefore, if your website is impossible to read or doesn’t show up in search because Google now gives preference to mobile-friendly websites, you’re losing prospects.

Put Your Site to the Test

Ready to take a good look at your website on mobile? Pull out your smartphone, type in your website URL, and go through each item in the checklist below. Do you notice any of the following?

		Yes	No
1	Your entire home page shrinks to fit on your screen, so it’s super tiny.
2	You can’t read the text unless you expand the page with your fingers.
3	It requires horizontal (left to right) scrolling to see the page.
4	The images look like postage stamps – or smaller.
5	Video won’t play because it requires an Adobe Flash plug-in.
6	The navigation isn’t visible unless you scroll horizontally or vertically.
7	Your “fat fingers” have trouble selecting the correct links.
8	Pop-ups obscure the site and you can’t close them.
9	It takes a long time for your site to load.
10	A Google search for your site on a smartphone doesn’t include the words “mobile-friendly” next to the search results.

Did you check no in any of the boxes? If so, it’s likely that your site isn’t optimized for mobile. Here’s why:

Each page on your website appears in its entirety, just as it does on a desktop, only it’s a teeny tiny version. That means everything is small: the text, the images, the links and the navigation. To see anything, you have to expand a page or scroll horizontally. Since links are small and close together, it’s hard to click them. Ideally, text size should be 16 pixels or larger for readability, and any buttons or links should be at least 40 pixels wide or tall for optimal fat finger click-ability.

Other issues you may have encountered:

• Video doesn’t play on your site: Most likely, it’s because it’s encoded in Adobe Flash, which doesn’t work on most smartphones. Now developers use HTML5. (Note: Video on YouTube will work, because YouTube uses HTML5.)
• Large pop-ups: Do you have a pop-up inviting customers to sign up for a newsletter or email list? It might be fine for your desktop, but if it’s not coded correctly, it will obscure your website behind it and may be impossible to close on a small screen.
• Load time: Your website, designed for a desktop, might have large image files and a lot of code. That can slow down the load time on mobile. In fact, a recent study by Akamai stated that 52 percent of users expect a mobile web page to load in 2 seconds or less.
• Poor search results on Google: In March 2018, Google announced some big news: it was ”boosting the ranking of mobile-friendly pages on mobile search results.” That means that mobile-friendly sites how have an edge over sites that are not. No matter how good your search engine optimization (SEO) — from keywords in URLS, headlines and text — your search rankings will suffer.

Next Steps

Ensuring your website is mobile friendly is a smart business investment. You provide your clients a with a great user experience when they visit your website on any device they choose, and you help them find your website because your search results improve. This will have a huge impact on your brand and how customers perceive your business.

Ready to go mobile?

We’d love to help you get started. Contact Comet Creative today.