Is a Responsive Website Financially Right for You?

Written by: Rusty PilePresident and Director of Marketing

We all know that on April 21st Google began to give favoritism to websites that it considers are mobile friendly. We call these “responsive” sites. If you still haven’t made the change, you’re not alone. A recent study shows that only 19% of today’s top 10,000 websites are using responsive web design. That means, while you are reading this, the Google ranking for the other 8100 top websites is actively dropping. If you listen closely, you can almost hear the clatter. Google is doing this because those sites provide a bad user experience for anyone on a mobile phone or tablet.

It was also recently shown that today’s mobile devices account for about 30% of the organic traffic across all websites, and that number is growing. Of course some industries account for more mobile traffic than others, reaching as much as 70%.

The real question is, how financially relevant is mobile traffic to your particular website? How can you know? If you sell consumer goods through your site the simple answer is “very relevant”. That’s because people search for and buy stuff on their phones and iPads all the time. But what about the rest of us? The answer is still easy if your web designer cared enough to install Google Analytics or some other visitor tracking system on your site (it’s easy and free so he certainly should have.) Log in to your analytics account and you’ll see how many of your visitors are on mobile devices, how long they stay, the search engine they used, etc. With this information, you can roughly calculate how much the loss of this business would mean to your bottom line over a period of 5 years, adding about 7% to each consecutive year for the growth in mobile use. Compare this loss to the cost of making your website mobile friendly today and you have your answer. Why 5 years? Because by then you’ll pretty much be forced to make the change since all the big search engines will require it (including desktop versions).

Another issue to consider is the damage being done to your reputation when you avoid upgrading to a modern, responsive website. In this study 48% of mobile users said a non-mobile site made them feel like the business simply doesn’t care. It’s even worse if you own an e-commerce site because the same study found that 67% of users said they’re more likely to purchase from a mobile-friendly site. Some other statistics such as those published by Econsultancy state that 62% of companies increased sales after a mobile upgrade. WebUndies who sells family sleepwear increased sales by 169.2%when they made the switch back in 2012 and O’Neill Clothing’s mobile transactions jumped an amazing 112.5% on iPhones and 333.33% on Android when they went responsive. For more information and statistics about making the responsive leap, check out Mark Runyon’s article at Web Designer Depot.

Call us if you need help determining your particular need for a responsive website upgrade or for costs to have our Phoenix web designers upgrade your site. Avenue 25 is here for you.