The if it ain’t broke don’t fix it approach for business is one we see all too often, and it’s an attitude that can have significant negative long-term implications for your business’ performance. Change for the sake of change can undoubtedly create problems with unnecessary overhead, but by the same token, failing to adapt to a changing market is a recipe for disaster. Looking at a common way in which this danger is expressed, not targeting mobiles with websites, we want to explore what businesses can do to keep up.
A Move Towards Mobiles
Back in 2011, only 6.09% of internet traffic came from mobiles. This was only natural, as the slow processors and cumbersome user interfaces rendered them frustrating to use. Over time, faster devices and better UX would lead mobiles to not just become viable, but in many cases, preferable. This wasn’t just thanks to improving mobile systems either, thanks also have to go to website technologies that facilitated the process.
Combined, these elements have led to a modern environment where, as of July 2021, mobiles account for 56.75% of all web traffic. Though the integration of mobiles appears to have plateaued since 2017, growing levels of internet access overall mean that this method of use is still too important to ignore.
A move towards offering mobile websites isn’t just about creating greater levels of convenience and extending access either. In some industries, these efforts have fundamentally reshaped the way businesses operate. YouTube, for example, has mobiles accounting for around 70% of watch time. This makes sense, given their reliance on short-form content, but they’re far from the only website to benefit from a greater mobile focus.
Also having a transformative level of integration is the online casino arena. Whether just general browsing or playing the entire library of titles like slot, table, and live games, mobiles are now an indispensable part of online casino culture. Nowadays, the majority of casino games are designed from the ground up to be suited to mobile devices as developers take note of how their player base access their titles. Even Google itself has adopted this shift through both text and voice searches. As of 2021, around 96% of all search traffic on Google comes from mobile, and considering these searches often lead to direct business webpage hits, this is not a statistic that can be ignored.
Adapting to the New Market
As for making the relevant changes for your business, the primary method can be found through approaches in updating your website to the newest HTML5 technology. Offering broad improvements over older systems, HTML5 makes it possible for webpages to scale effectively to any of the myriad mobile phones without issue. It should be noted, however, that this indicates a starting position, where the individual components will still require special attention.
As an example of this, consider the work that goes into graphical banners. For a desktop website, it’s assumed that a user will have access to a widescreen at least a foot across. This can tempt businesses to include smaller text or slogans as they balance visual real estate, but such an approach can be harmful to mobiles.
Consider the iPhone 12, one of the most popular modern phones on the market. As one of the larger screen devices, this boasts a height and width of 5.78 and 2.82 inches respectively. Even with their high pixel density of 460 PPI, users can’t make out the same detail as they would on a computer monitor. For this reason, it can be worth building a website’s graphics to cater to mobiles first, where expanding them to desktops will be a much easier transition.
The other side of this coin is the placement of interactive features like search bars and buttons. On desktops, the precision of mice and keyboards means mistakes can be rare even with cramped designs, but mobiles don’t have this luxury. For this reason, we’d recommend businesses avoid placing touchable features too close to each other, to mitigate user clumsiness and frustration while still creating a responsive website on both mobile and desktop.
If you’re struggling to think of new ideas for a redesigned website, remember you can always look to other industries and even competitors for inspiration. While you never want to lift designs wholesale, this type of investigation can give you better insight into what works and what doesn’t. It might take some work and experimentation before a new website goes live, but for the sake of the future trajectory of businesses, you’ll thank yourself for making the jump sooner rather than later.
