I’m a smartphone user, and I specifically love my mobile internet. That’s why I can’t pretend that this post is unbiased; I want you to optimize your site for users like me. Come on, folks – mobile optimization for your website is like cleaning up your house before a dinner party. It shows guests that you’re happy they’ve come, and you’d like them to stay awhile!
Don’t just take my word for it – check out these numbers and see if they don’t send mobile optimization to the top of your priority list. (Epic shout-out to Google and their project Our Mobile Planet for providing the information shown below. You can download a full report of their mobile findings for your country here.)
1. To set the stage, in the United States 56 percent of adults use a smartphone.
2. Not impressed? This number has risen a whopping 25 percent in the last two years.
3. If you needed further convincing, the younger generations are blowing that number out of the water, which means average usage will only continue to rise as time goes on.
4. Ninety-two percent of smartphone owners visit the Internet on their device on a daily basis. The number of people who do not use their smartphone for internet is negligible, less than one half of one percent.
5. This means that on a daily basis, smartphone owners use the mobile web three percent more often than they use an actual computer to surf the web.
6. Ok. You get it; but when these users are on the web, what are they doing? If you think they’re not finding ways to spend money, I’m afraid you’re mistaken. These stats show that people’s searches are impacting your bottom line.
7. We want to highlight one of these numbers – the one with the bottom line. Fourty-six percent of us smartphone users make purchases on our phones.
If we break this down by age, more than half of all younger users have made mobile purchases since owning a smartphone.
8. Mobile optimization can especially impact your business locally. Fifty-five percent of smartphone users will perform a local search on their phone at least once per week, and of that number, 25 percent perform local searches daily.
9. Ok, ok. You get it. People love smartphones and they are willing to spend money on them. What’s your next step? Let’s look at a few barriers preventing people from making mobile purchases.
You might think that some of these are shortcomings of the medium. After all, it’s not as though you can change the size of their screen. With responsive design or a dedicated mobile site, however, you can design an interface that’s easy to navigate on a smaller screen. Check out these fantastic designs below; they make a screen feel much larger than it is using simple navigation and large, easy to press buttons.
Some sites, like Etsy.com and Patagonia.com, want to let you know that they take mobile seriously by designing an app for shopping on their site. This adds up to customers finding them, having a good online experience, and coming back for more.
So what are you waiting for? You can find tips and suggestions for mobile optimization and specific design tools in the posts below:
- 6 Tips & 15 Free Tools to Make an Awesome Mobile Website
- 9 Tips to Optimize Mobile Site Speed
- 16 Tools for Responsive Web Design: Part 1, Grids and Wireframe
- Tools for Responsive Website Design Part 2: Typography, Images & Videos
Let us know in the comments if you’ve got a site that looks great on mobile, and we’ll check it out!
The post What the Flash?! 9 Statistics That’ll Make You Want to Get Your Mobile Optimization On appeared first on WooRank Blog.