Why Optimize for Mobile? It’s 52%  of traffic

by | Jul 19, 2018 | Technology Featured

Recently released global data has shown that mobile website traffic worldwide has more than quadrupled since 2012, with mobile representing over 50% of all the global web pages served in 2018.  For any business or group that relies on internet traffic for their survival it’s important to know the trends in mobile and ways to ensure that you optimize for mobile.

Percentage of all global web pages served to mobile phones from 2009 to 2018 – Source

Since February 2017, mobile search has provided 65% of all internet traffic in Asia and just under 60% in Africa. These markets are higher than in Europe due to the eruption of easily accessible and affordable smartphones in the global market. Mobile also better serves those at the lower end of the economic spectrum as it offers the ability to access the internet via a less expensive connection with no need for wired installation ad  expensive landlines.

Most famous social network sites worldwide as of April 2018, ranked by number of active users (in millions) –Source

This increase in mobile usage can also be put down to the plethora of social media networks available at the moment that continue to thread the line between online and real life. The impact of these networks such as Facebook, the first network to exceed 1 billion registered accounts, have an incredibly strong influence on the decision and digital identity of their users.  The leading social platforms are available in a multitude of languages and their key selling point is the ability to connect with friends and family from the other side of the globe, regardless of physical limitations. It is suggested that there are almost 2 billion users of these social networks and this is expected increase further as mobile reaches further into the market. It isn’t strange for laptops to have been left gathering dust as our mobiles become more advanced and able to cope with almost every technological facet of our day to day lives.

It’s important to ensure you are up to speed and that your site is optimised for mobile, but it can be hard to know how to optimise for mobile. There are plenty of easily accessible tests and tools from Google to give you a good idea of the most important changes you might need to make. In fact it couldn’t be easier.

Go to google and type in “is my site mobile friendly”, and you’ll be faced with this.

Type in your domain (eg. www.mysite.com), click “Run Test”, and you shall hopefully find an image like this.

This is a great indication that, on all the basic necessary levels, your site is able to host mobile web traffic. However, this is just from a technical perspective, and is unable to provide detailed knowledge on an issue that might be hampering your site.

To get more details and a starting point to improve from, especially if your website didn’t receive the green mobile-friendly seal of approval, this blog contains information about free tools and steps on how to optimise for mobile.

If are looking to optimise wordpress for mobile, then you are in a good position to take advantage of the large number of plug-ins available that specialise in improving mobile performance such as W3 Total Cache and Duda Mobile. Besure to keep track of the plugins you install as unexpected faults can occur when certain plugins have compatibility issues with ones previously installed.

The ability to have a site optimised for mobile is available to amateurs as well as professionals but it is important to note the importance of this as it begins to steam ahead in its usage over other mediums.

 

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