Capture All the Traffic with Mobile Website Design

It was 2014 that the number of mobile-device users worldwide exceeded the number of desktop (and laptop) device users for the first time. It was 2015 that studies showed Americans spent more of their Internet time on mobile devices than on desktop/laptop devices. 46.7% of all retail website traffic was from mobile devices; that number was up 4% from the year before and 7% from the year before that. In short, there are no end to the statistics that show that mobile website design is an integral part of the future of any website that hopes to sell people something.

“But DCMMoguls,” you might say, “Those statistics don’t tell you how many people use both a mobile device and a desktop device — maybe we don’t need to invest in a mobile redesign after all!” And you’d be wrong.

The reason you’d be wrong is that even when people do go back and forth between mobile and desktop devices, they don’t do the same kinds of searches from each one. Simply put, people who are doing retail searches from mobile devices are almost universally looking for something they can buy right now. They’re out and about, and they realized that they need a widget — and they’re either going to find a store where they can buy one, or they’re going to order one online before they get home.

In contrast, desktop searchers are quite often either tire-kicking (looking for information about a product rather than looking to buy), or they’re far less urgent about buying the thing and are quite likely to read a page, hit the back button, read four more, and then pick which one to buy.

The Counter-Argument

There is one solid counter-argument to the notion that a mobile website design is vital to modern Internet commerce, and that is the argument of the conversion rates. For whatever reasons — and believe us, the reasons are being heavily debated in every corner of the ecommerce guru community — conversions rates vary heavily based on the type of device used to visit a site.

• Average conversion rates from desktop devices hover around 4.5%
• From tablets, they sit in the vicinity of 3.8%
• But from phones, the average conversion rate is a mere 1.4%

But before you go thinking that this is a good excuse to not invest in mobile website creation, let’s do one bit more of math:

If we round it off to half of all traffic comes from mobile devices, and you assume that all of those mobile devices are smartphones, then out of 2000 visitors:

• A business with only desktop-oriented websites will land 1000 visitors and convert 45 of them.
• A business with both desktop and mobile-oriented sites will land 2000 visitors. They’ll convert the same 45 of the desktop 1000, and then they’ll convert an additional 14 of the mobile 1000, for a total of 59, or 31% more than the desktop-only business.

Could your Internet business do with a 31% boost in sales?