Survival of the Mobile-Friendliest

Whilst the phrase “Survival of the fittest” originated from the Darwinian evolutionary theory as a way of describing the mechanism of ‘natural selection’ or more rather the survival of the species, the contemporary phrase “Survival of the Mobile-friendliest” demonstrates the digital selection of websites that must be mobile friendly as a way of survival on the World Wide Web.

 

Mark Obama, on his way to office suddenly remembered that wife Rachel had asked him to check the price of the latest mobile phone chargers as her own mobile phone had been lying dead for the last couple of days due to a fault in the charger. However, his attempts to collect the information through his smartphone did not yield much tangible result  since the websites he tried to connect with provided distorted half screen images as these were not mobile friendly. The result – neither the vendor nor the customer ever benefited from the exercise!

 

Steve and Susan Sanders, while searching through their smartphone a suitable Homestay in Auckland, New Zealand where they had planned to spend their honeymoon became crestfallen since most of these websites were not mobile friendly and so created navigation problems. The result – neither the Kiwis nor the honeymooners gained anything out of that futile attempt!

 

What research have revealed

Google while researching the importance of mobile sites found that as much as 72% of consumers not only look for but actually demand mobile friendly sites for ease of navigation and other benefits.

 

Studies have also revealed that consumers verily lose interest in sites that are not compatible with their mobile devices. It had also hinted that businesses should be listening to consumers: where there is demand there remains the opportunity to succeed. Nevertheless, it is quite clear that the demand is for mobile websites.

 

What Forbes has said

Allan Hall from Forbes writes how “Listening to Customers Yields Success.” It is a significant piece that highlights the essentiality for small businesses to learn to proactively listen to what consumers are saying. “All great and successful company leaders,” Hall adds “have a clear understanding of their customers, and in this case, it’s clear that businesses must understand that customers want mobile sites.”

 

How consumers look at it

Google research has further found that 67% of consumers are willing to buy a product or use a service on mobile-friendly site. Needless to say, small businesses are most likely to have an edge while developing sales online if their sites are mobile friendly.

 

At the same time, as indicated by the stat, since consumers are currently more eager than ever to conduct online shopping, there is no reason on part of the businesses to postpone or delay in creating mobile friendly websites.

 

Page load speed matters a lot

Incidentally, everyone, even remotely associated with consumer behavior pattern know that while 74% of consumers will not spend more than 5 seconds for a web page to load on their mobile devices, 71% of mobile browsers anticipate web pages to load as quickly, if not faster than being loaded on their desktop computers. In view of such circumstances and the likelihood of users being on 3G/4G network, the performance, to be least said, is fairly crucial

 

Finally, Google’s views on the topic

Meanwhile, it may be worth listening to what Google says  on this issue, as pointed out below.

• Make mobile pages render in less than one second. Delays are often caused by external JavaScript and CSS.
• Make the mobile page faster by way of cutting down the volume of data transferred, as also requests.
• Optimize for mobile by putting back the loading of JavaScript till when really required.
• Use Google PageSpeed Insights to check your site for page loading issues.

 

Postscript:

Website designers who want their clients to prosper with sites created by them should pay fullest attention towards designing mobile friendly sites, as otherwise they would not only be singing the Swan Song for their patrons but also herald their own ruin.