If you’re a website owner, manager, or developer, you know to always check your website’s performance and design on both desktop vs mobile, especially since Google’s big drive for mobile-first. Google has even centred their 2021 Core Web Vitals around making sure that your website is efficient on mobile.
Google had a good reason to be pushing us to make sure our websites were mobile-friendly since it’s estimated that 61% of customers in the US now land on a website through a mobile device.
So with all of this focus on making sure your website:
- Works on mobile (at the very least)
- Loads just as fast as desktop
- Has mobile optimised content
- Passes Core Web Vitals
“The market share ratios of those OSs are Android 47.51%, iOS 41.97%, Symbian 3.31%, and Windows phone OS 2.57%. There are some other mobile OSs that are less used (BlackBerry, Samsung, etc.)”
According to sciencedirect.com
What are some of the fundamental ways that your website can change depending on the mobile and browser?
There’s a variety of things on your website that can be impacted depending on what the customer is using to look at your website. For example:
1. Screen size
If you’ve optimised your website for mobile and considered a “small screen” in relation to desktop, how do you know “one size fits all”? Your website content isn’t going to automatically fit all mobile screen types meaning you run the risk of vital content like CTAs being missed out/cut out or below the fold on mobile.
One way to check this is by using another of Google’s key tools (are you starting to see a theme here?) which is The Mobile-Friendly Test Tool. Alternatively, if you’re a developer use the “meta viewport” tag in the HTML.
2. Page speed and loading time
Your website loading time can affect everything from your conversions to your SEO rankings so getting it right on both desktop and mobile is a must. But it doesn’t stop there. You have to make sure that whatever browser someone could be using on mobile is also loading fast (i.e. less than 2 seconds). For example, iOS users tend to use Safari. How does your website load on mobile Safari on iOS vs desktop Safari?
How do I check this?
Firstly, check your overall page speed on mobile before you get more granular. If you can see that your website is very slow on mobile in general, you need to fix the significant factors before diving into browsers on mobile devices and which devices at that.
You can check by using Google’s Page Speed Insights which will show you the speed of your website loading, if it “passes” Core Web Vitals, and what areas need to be worked on like LCP.
Once you’ve checked this, you can use Google Analytics to go more granular.
3. Responsiveness of visual content
If your website is super responsive on Chrome on desktop, you’re winning! If it’s super responsive on iOS on Safari, you’ve nabbed a large majority of your audience. But what if Microsoft Edge isn’t working on mobile?
Responsiveness is not a given. That is the key thing to remember and the only way you will know if there’s an issue is to test, test, test. If you’re using a CMS system that allows you to pick a “theme”, you should be able to see in its description whether it’s considered responsive across all devices.
Other tips include making sure videos are responsive on mobile, images are compressed, and table data is responsive on mobile.
These are just 3 examples of how a lack of mobile optimisation can affect your customer engagement with your website.
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