In recent Cheshire web design news, the biggest announcement that will most likely have any impact with small local businesses is news that has come directly from Google last month.
Recently Google decided to make a major announcement surrounding mobile-friendliness and how this will play a major role in local search on a worldwide scale. Coming into effect from Tuesday 21st April 2015, Google will be changing its algorithm patterns which will see mobile search results now favour content that is optimised for mobile devices e.g. mobile responsive design.
To quote Google in a nutshell “We will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results. Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimized for their devices” Read the full Google Blog post.
Now having read the statement provided by Google, this isn’t a blog telling you to spend money on your website, this blog is simply written to highlight the importance of a responsive website and how you can check to see if you website is responsive or if the impending changes have an impact on your website.
Responsive Design in one sentence
If you are not sure what a responsive website is, it basically means your website is designed to provide the best optimal viewing experience across multiple devices such as laptops, mobiles, ipads, pretty much everything you can think off. The purpose of responsive design is to make the website as easy as possible to read and navigate around the website by minimizing the use of resizing or scrolling around the website. The image above is a great example of a responsive website….
How to check if your website is fully responsive?
Checking to see if your website is fully responsive couldn’t be any easier. You can use the Google Mobile Friendly Website Checker. Simply type the URL in of your website and within a matter of seconds, you will see if your website if configured properly and will see how viewable your website is on a mobile device.
Google Mobile Friendly Website Checker showing the results for B2BPPM.
There is also plenty of other website out there that you can use to determine just what your website looks like across a host of devices. If you head over to (http://ami.responsivedesign.is/), simply type the URL of your website in and within seconds you can see how your website looks across multiple devices….
If your website passes, then you simply have nothing to worry about. If not, don’t panic, sure there will be plenty of Cheshire web design agencies who will cue up to take your money but realistically it is worth checking to see what volume of traffic you get from mobile devices.
How to check what your current mobile traffic is?
Accessing your website mobile traffic is a simple, straightforward activity. Access your website analytics and asses the levels of mobile traffic that you are currently receiving and ask yourself the question of if you think it’s worth losing mobile rankings.
Device statistics for our clients Beautiful Mind Promotions over one month.
As you can see from the image in the example, one of our clients currently has over 32% of overall visitors to their website so if their website was not responsive, it would certainly be worth considering as this is over a quarter of the traffic.
Since Google have been testing the new algorithm changes since 2015, make sure you check if you have been losing traffic as recently as up to January 2015.
The Solutions
So now you have reviewed the mobile traffic on your website, there are 3 directions where you can head from here. First, you simply already have a responsive website, you don’t see the value if you don’t have any web traffic, or you simply can’t afford it…
If you want a fully responsive website, we would love to hear from you but if you thing that this may become a little pricey, the alternative solution could be the untitled™ one-tap solution.
One-Tap Solution
One-Tap technology is a great solution if you are looking for your website to stay exactly the way it currently is. When a visitor browses on your website on a mobile or tablet device, instead of struggling to navigate and scroll around the whole website, they will be greeted with a pop-up window that contains all the essential information needed such as the address, telephone number and map of your small local business.
Visitors can access this information within ‘one-tap’ and easily have the ability to open and close the one-tap option and still able to view the website in normal capacity.
What are you going to do?
If your website isn’t responsive or if you are looking at an alternative solution such as ‘One-Tap Technology’ we would love to hear from you. You can give James Cox a ring on 0845 363 7082 or for more news on how to grow your website, make sure you check out and sign up to our bi-monthly Web Grower Newsletter.