There are currently, as of March 2017, 7,519,028,970 people on earth. Out of those 7+ Trillion people, 3,739,698,500 of them use the internet. If we take this a step further, this year there are 4.77 Billion mobile phone users worldwide, and that number is increasing daily. 58.9% of those mobile phone users accessed the Internet on their device so far this year. It is estimated that by 2019 63.4% of all mobile phone users will have Internet access on their phones. In 2020, the number of smartphone users worldwide is projected to reach 2.87 billion, up from 2.1 billion in 2016.
Just looking at those statistics should be enough to convince you how important having a mobile friendly website design should be. But if you aren’t convinced quite yet, here are a few more reasons:
- We take our phones with us everywhere: It’s not always convenient to take our computers with us everywhere we go, and impossible to take a desktop with us. We also all know that the screen space on a mobile device is smaller than a desktop. Touch is the primary mode of input. Entering data into forms is painful at best when you’re trying to tap it out on a virtual keyboard with small keys. That makes the user interaction different than on a desktop. By making your website easier to interact with your site on a smartphone will help keep customers coming back to your website. You will want to make sure that your font size is legible on the small screen so that they won’t get frustrated and exit out of your website out of frustration.
- The ease of online shopping with a click of a button: People want information and services, and they want them fast and reliable. It’s not a secret that our attention span is growing smaller and smaller as technology gets bigger and bigger. Online shopping is a huge industry and everyone wants a piece of that pie. You can even order Pie online now! Online orders last year, not just for pie, had an average value of 82.5 U.S. dollars. In total, e-retail sales in the United States alone amounted to close to 292 BILLION U.S. dollars! This is the era where we are constantly on our phones at all hours of the day and night. By having a mobile friendly web design you have the capacity to have your website in over 4 Billion peoples hands. That is a ginormous market. BUT, if your website is hard to navigate or difficult to order on, the small attention span will click out and find another web site easier to navigate. Which leads us to….
- There is a lot of competition: People love to browse on their mobile devices while traveling, in the car (not while driving), at school, at the grocery store, while shopping etc.. However, when they find that sites that they normally used at their PCs are not mobile compatible, they might end up switching to mulberrymaids.com site that provides similar services and is mobile compatible as well.
If you are not someone who is currently surfing the net from your mobile, then you will soon be in the minority. In the very near future, most people will be using a mobile phone for most of their web browsing. This means that any business that has a presence on the Internet right now should make appropriate changes so that its website is mobile friendly.
Written by Kim Ganir
