Why Your Web Site Must Be Mobile-Friendly

Recently I helped a fellow author redesign and update her web site in support of her new children’s book. The site has lots of content, and had only been maintained since it was launched in 2013.

After many hours, the web site was ready. Or so I thought. When you called it up on your laptop or desktop computer, you’d find a site with easy navigation.

But the trouble was, the web site wasn’t mobile-friendly. When you called it up on your cell phone or on mobile device—an Amazon Kindle, for example—you’d have to stretch the screen to read the text, and it became more difficult to navigate.

In today’s world, web sites that aren’t mobile-friendly lose visitors, and prospective sales.

The trend towards using mobile-friendly web sites is growing as the number of people with mobile technology is growing. According to the Consumer Technology Association, the global population is 7 billion people—with 3.7 billion people owning some sort of mobile technology, while 3.5 billion own toothbrushes.

Because of these numbers, mobile-friendly technology is becoming less a best practice, but more of a standard.

One way to test your web site for its mobile-friendliness is to call it up on a mobile device. A better way to conduct such a test is to visit a free Google page that will perform the test for you. The URL is www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/.

Web developers often use WordPress themes to ensure that their web sites are mobile-friendly. These themes are more-recently developed themes; the theme I described earlier was an older theme that was not designed with mobile-friendliness in mind.

With one of these later themes, if you were accessing a web site through your cell phone, and wanted to go to another page on that web site, you’d have a scrollable menu from which you would select the page you wanted to visit. You didn’t have to stretch the screen to access that page.

As I learned, it might take a while to figure out the best way to move forward with a mobile-friendly web site. But because such sites are becoming the standard, my author client can be confident that everyone can access her web site, regardless of their technology.