Even after all these years, many people in B2B marketing convince themselves that nearly all their prospects are using desktop or laptop computers with nice big screens. Yet for any business, two minutes looking at visitor analytics will probably show usthat between 25% and 75% of visitors are viewing our websites on mobile devices. And if our site looks poor on mobile devices, many users won’t have come back, so mobile viewing share might have been even higher.
Google has crawled our sites pretending to be a mobile device for a long time, and that process is now complete. So add that into the equation and there’s no excuse for not designing our sites ‘mobile first’. If we do so, it’d take a genuine effort for the site not to look good on any size screen, whereas millions of sites designed for big screens still look unusable on small ones.
A thorough test
For anyone still unsure what a site designed for mobile viewing looks like, open up the site on a mobile phone and answer these questions:
- Does the site load quickly?
- Do pages look simple and uncluttered from top to bottom?
- Is site navigation findable, obvious and straightforward?
- Are links and buttons well separated so users don’t hit the wrong one?
- Does the site respond well to a change from portrait to landscape format?
- Is every single word large enough to read easily?
And don’t just test this out on one mobile device. What about different makes and browsers? What about tablets? We’d all be livid if our website designer said: “The site looks great on my Dell PC but unfortunately doesn’t look great on HP computers”. Excuses about mobile devices are equally unacceptable.