In 2021, Your Mobile Website Experience Is Critical to Marketing Success
Mobile website experience has mattered for quite some time now, but the importance of a strong mobile experience only continues to rise. What is mobile site experience, exactly? Your site needs to be:
Mobile-friendly – Can the site be navigated without needing to pinch to zoom or scroll sideways?
Fast to load – Will your site load before users are compelled to click back to their search?
Easy to use – Can users find what they’re looking for?
Good mobile site experience is no longer a competitive advantage, it’s essential to your performance in search.
Mobile Is the New Desktop
It’s no surprise with as much as we’re all connected to our phones that a lot of searches occur from mobile devices. As early as 2015, desktop traffic was surpassed by mobile device traffic, and it hasn’t slowed down since. As of February 2021, mobile devices make up over 54% of traffic worldwide:
In 2015, 61% of mobile device users were more likely to contact a local business if their site was mobile-friendly. Nowadays, if your site isn’t optimized for mobile, not only are you less likely to get leads, you’re less likely to appear in search to begin with.
From Mobile-Friendly to Mobile-First
Google first clearly indicated that mobile experience impacted search results with their mobile-friendly update that rolled out in April 2015. At this point in time, users began to see different search results on desktop and mobile devices to cater to users’ needs. Site content was still number one, so sites with poor mobile performance could still rank well, even number one, without a mobile-friendly site.
Taking it to the next level, Google began experimenting with mobile-first indexing in 2016. That essentially means Google looks at the mobile version of sites when evaluating content to rank and appear on Google. By December 2018, half of the pages shown in results globally used mobile-first indexing. Prior to this shift, Google was looking at the desktop version of sites when ranking content, but because the majority of Google users were now accessing Google search on a mobile device, the mobile experience became a priority.
The default for new sites switched to mobile-first indexing in July 2019, but the transition for existing sites was significantly less immediate. Switching the entirety of the web to mobile-first indexing has taken years. In mid-2020, Google announced they experienced setbacks from their original goal of mobile-first indexing for all sites across the web by September 2020. As of the end of March 2021, Google’s rollout should be complete, and desktop-only sites will be dropped from Google’s index.