Mobile Website Design

All websites must be mobile friendly for several significant reasons:

• In 2018, 52.2 percent of all website traffic worldwide was generated through mobile phones, up from 50.3 percent in the previous year.  Statista 2018
  
• Since April 2015, Google officially started rewarding the search rank of mobile-friendly sites and penalizing sites that were not mobile-friendly.
• On March 26th, 2018, Google officially announced that they are going to be indexing websites based on their mobile version- not their desktop version.

Bottom Line:  If you want to rank well, your website must be mobile friendly.

Years ago, if you wanted your website to work on a mobile device, a special version of it needed to be built. Now, thanks to responsive design, your website is smart. The browser tells it what device the user is on, and the website gives that device special instructions that change the display and the navigation to fit it.

The best part is that responsive design is now the norm. It is included with all WordPress themes that are worth using. It adjusts the size of what is displayed. It reduces the number of columns from 4 to 3 to 2 and then single file. When on a phone, it changes the main navigation to a menu that pops out with a list of the links that can be easily selected on a touch screen.

To see it in action, change this browser window from full screen (the box in the upper right corner next to the “X”) to “restore down” the browser window to a smaller size. Then, grab and edge and slowly narrow the width until you can no longer do so. You will see how this page gracefully reduces in size and then how it will look on a phone.

Many WordPress themes also let you hide certain parts of the web page on a mobile device. Some content, such as large photos might be superfluous and add to page load times. Some features might not display well because the plugin was not designed by its developer to be responsive. Certain content might the type that users will wait to read when they’re sitting behind a monitor. These items can and should be hidden to make the mobile version lean and more usable.

If your website is not currently mobile ready, it is a good time for a refresh or a new WordPress website.