35% of website visitors are using mobile / tablet devices.
For e-commerce sites this increases to 47% of users with 28% using mobiles and 19% tablets.*
Google has recently announced it will favour sites that are mobile-friendly for users searching via mobile devices.
A recent review of real traffic patterns for some of our hosted / managed web sites revealed the following statistics:
Table 1: Percentage of visits by browser type, March / April 2015*
| Sector | Desktop | Mobile | Tablet |
|---|---|---|---|
| E-Commerce | 53.23 | 27.54 | 19.08 |
| Service Sector | 63.94 | 20.76 | 15.29 |
| Sales and Service | 69.50 | 17.00 | 13.50 |
| Commercial | 84.86 | 11.71 | 3.43 |
| Overall | 64.66 | 21.00 | 14.29 |
Other reports indicate that smartphones and tablets account for over 60 percent of “total digital media time”, i.e. mobile / tablet users typically spend longer on websites than desktop users.
Given a choice, mobile users will switch to a mobile friendly site.
You no longer have to have two sites, one for desktop and one for mobile, one site can serve both. A “responsive” website is one that re-shapes itself according to the size of the viewport being used to view it.
The alternatives are to have the web-server deliver different content to the same pages depending on the device being used or to have a separate “mobile version” of your web site. AnnWebCom have never favoured either of these due to the increased cost of ownership and the possibility of discriminating against one type of user verses another.
Of the available techniques for mobile-friendly sites, the “responsive” approach is the one favoured by Google.
AnnWebCom have been designing and deploying “responsive” sites since mid-2013. Sites that were designed before then are likely to need upgrading to be mobile-friendly.
Check your site using Google’s “mobile friendly test” page. If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, it’s worth considering having it upgraded to a “responsive” site.
All types of websites can be designed to be responsive:
You may also be interested in having your own mobile App.
* Based on a sample of over 40 AnnWebCom managed or hosted websites as of March-April 2015