7 Reasons Why Your Website Needs to Be Responsive

We are sure that you have heard this before, perhaps too many times, but your website needs to be responsive. Mobile has replaced desktop as a primary device for internet browsing and the number of people who are using smaller screens when browsing is increasing. Mobile is here to stay and businesses are focusing on the mobile users. We bet you are wondering why?

Well, first of all, a responsive website makes browsing through mobile simpler and automatically adapts to the size of the screen of the device that it is viewed on. This takes care of the optimization issues and there is no need for building and maintaining several websites for different devices that is extremely inefficient and impractical. This is not all, so read on to find out what are the reasons why your website needs to be responsive.

Everyone Is On Mobile

Nowadays smartphones are not considered to be exceptions and we are living in a society where excessive usage of smartphones is something that is considered normal. Today over one billion of people are accessing the web from their mobile devices and over 80% of internet users are smartphone users; simply put, if someone is online, it is likely that they are on their smartphones. This statistics is only the beginning of the story, we believe that these numbers will be bigger in the future. So, you need to think mobile, simply because everyone is on mobile.

When On Mobile, Users Behave Differently

In theory, the same people are behind both desktop and mobile traffic, but they behave differently across their devices. Even though they have a limited bandwidth, they consume a really high amount of all visual media, where their major focus is on images and short videos. Websites like Instagram and Vine have achieved massive success just because they offered solely images and videos. For capturing this kind of traffic you are going to need an optimized design to harness the power of these types of media in order to engage your users.

Almost 50% of Web Traffic Is Mobile

There is no such thing as a business owner who is not interested in increasing traffic. Mobile media consumption is over 20% higher than desktop, meaning that almost 50% of all digital media consumption and web traffic is via mobile. So, if you are interested, as a business owner, in attracting mobile traffic, you need to think mobile and engage your visitors with visual types of media.

 

Mobile Users Are More Likely To Buy

Mobile users are actually spending more than desktop users, because smartphone users are the ones who account for the lowest dollar amount per every transaction. They make small and frequent purchases, so, if your business is selling something that is below $10, people who are mobile users are an ideal target audience for your business. The users of tablets have the highest average transaction compared to other devices and that includes desktop. Even these users won’t shop from your website if your mobile UX is poor.

 

They Tend To Switch Screens

Almost 90% of people tend to switch between devices in order to accomplish their goals, meaning that even if you receive the bulk of your conversions via desktop, users will also engage with your website via mobile devices in one point of the whole sale process. In many cases when users are bored, they are searching for things that interest them, after that they move on to a desktop to finalize the purchase after they have previously found something they would like to buy. So, if your website cannot handle screens of different sizes, you will be missing out on sales.

 

Google Cares For Responsive Design

For quite some time now, Google has been favoring mobile friendliness in its rankings, but recently the stakes have been raised; having a responsive website is more important for Google than gathering organic traffic. Some of the latest Google’s algorithm update there are significant penalties for those websites that are not meeting the standards for mobile optimization. So, if you want to seriously improve the traffic of your website, or just keep the current one, your website needs to be optimized for mobile users.

 

Having a Great Mobile Website Will Differentiate Your Brand

If you have reached to the point that your brand still needs website optimization, you might feel that you need to catch up. This is true to some extent, but the reality is that many websites are still not optimized for mobile. A little over 50% of websites run by small businesses are responsive. You may wonder what this will mean for your business, well, you can have a fantastic opportunity to differentiate your brand from the competition. According to statistics, almost half of your competitors have websites that are not optimized, and the ones who have already implemented responsive design are probably not doing it in the right way.

If your website does not load fast enough, visitors will most likely abandon it and not return, but with a responsive design load times are better and faster. The first step in optimizing your website is implementing a responsive website design. To achieve the best result consider hiring some of the best responsive web design companies based on client reviews. After that you need to optimize your marketing efforts within your mobile responsive design, where you will take into consideration how customers are engaged and adjust your website accordingly.

from Feedster http://www.feedster.com/blog/ivandseo/7-reasons-why-your-website-needs-to-be-responsive/