We talk a lot about how important your website is when it comes to helping patients find you and make appointments, but if you’re still overlooking the importance of the mobile aspect of your website, you’re missing a crucial aspect of website design. The truth is, it’s not enough to have a mobile-friendly website anymore: it has to be mobile-first and optimized. You probably know that there are a lot of mobile users in the world, but you might not realize just how many there are now (spoiler alert: it’s a lot!), and many business owners subsequently fail to realize that there are standards set forth by Google and Web Standards to meet this demand.
Failure to meet these standards can have a real impact on the performance of your website, which can mean the difference between a successful investment and a stagnating business. Here’s what to know about mobile-first website design.
1. Mobile device usage has outpaced desktop usage since 2017.
Mobile phone ownership and usage grows every year, but most people are surprised to learn that mobile traffic has outpaced desktop traffic since 2017. While the exact numbers change slightly every year, mobile traffic tends to land at just over 50% of the total traffic on the web. If your website is built for desktop users and ignores mobile traffic, you’re effectively ignoring half of the traffic that visits your site. Can you afford to ignore half of your website traffic?
2. Google has been utilizing mobile-first indexing since 2019.
That’s right: Google has been using the mobile version of your website to determine how it should rank since 2019…so if you’ve been ignoring mobile design, your search engine optimization (SEO) has probably been suffering for it. It’s not a separate mobile-first index either: it’s just the one, so switching your focus from the desktop version of your site to the mobile version is incredibly important.
3. Patients want to schedule appointments from their mobile devices.
Most importantly, the patients who visit your website on their mobile devices are likely encountering a frustrating problem: the most common elements of a website that don’t work on a mobile device are usually the ones that convert visitors into patients. So, not only are you frustrating your visitors, you’re probably missing out on their business entirely. Forcing people to utilize other channels in order to reach you to schedule an appointment with you often results in so much frustration that they won’t even bother.
We Can Help
Need help improving your website’s performance? MyAdvice has been designing and improving websites for more than 20 years. Set up your complimentary consultation with one of our digital marketing experts today to see how we can help.
