We tweeted out a link to an article this weekend about Canadians’ mobile habits, and I’ve been ruminating about what the article’s said for a couple of days now.
The findings discussed in the article were best described in this paragraph:
What we’re seeing is that smartphones are Canadians’ remote controls for their lives. When people want to interact with each other or get any kind of information, they pull out their smartphones. Despite these huge increases in Canadian mobile ownership and usage, there’s still a gap to be closed in how we spend our marketing dollars and where we place our marketing efforts in this new mobile playground. Put simply, mobile is no longer an option—it’s a must-have.
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been taking an in-depth look at businesses in Cambridge and the surrounding area. These businesses have been across a wide variety of industries – manufacturers, restaurants, charities, placement agencies, and more. Of the 73 that I’ve looked at so far, 30 of them do not have a mobile-friendly website (either a website that resizes to fit a smartphone, or a completely separate mobile website) – that’s 40%of local businesses that still aren’t embracing the mobile user!
An additional 13%of these businesses had a poor score on Google Page Insights’ mobile page speed – considering that almost half of mobile users will leave your website if it doesn’t load within 3 seconds, this isn’t ideal.
One of the largest arguments that I’ve heard from local businesses about their reluctance to have a mobile-friendly website is that they focus on B2B, so they believe most of their users won’t necessarily be accessing their website on a phone or tablet. Now, I don’t know about you, but as a business owner, if I need to look up a product or service for my business, I reach for the closest device to me – and more often than not, that’s my smart phone. If the website isn’t mobile-friendly, I don’t go out of my way to get to my computer to check out the company’s website – instead, if I remember about the company the next time I sit down at my computer, I’ll check them out online.
If you find by looking at your analytics that many of your users are on desktop instead of mobile, it may not necessarily be a sign that you shouldn’t be updating your website so that it is mobile – in fact, it’s not unusual for a website’s mobile traffic to go up when their website is finally mobile friendly!
So, tell me, if you have a website that isn’t mobile friendly, what’s stopping you from making the change?
