Author: Chris Heiler
Back in July of 2014 I wrote/asked:
"What if one out of every three visitors to your company's website came directly from a mobile device like a smart phone or tablet? What would their experience be like when they get to your "front door"? Would it be intuitive and painless or a complete pain in the ass?"
When we analyzed the average monthly website traffic to our clients' websites five years ago we found 33% of visits were from a mobile device.
Based on how your own personal habits have changed, you can probably guess what has happened to this important metric.
Yeah, it's gone up. Significantly.
We (i.e.- Emmett) recently analyzed 17 lawn care and landscape company websites to see how visitors were accessing their websites.
Not a big surprise...
In the 12 months of 2018 we found that, across these 17 websites, an average of 52% of visitors were from a mobile device like a smartphone or tablet. The median for mobile traffic was 54%.
11 out of the 17 websites we analyzed had a majority of visitors coming from mobile devices.
If you are anything like 99% of the lawn and landscape industry companies we talk to you want more qualified leads from your website.
Understand this will not happen if your website appears as a hot mess on a mobile device for over 50% of your visitors. Frustrated visitors will bounce before converting if they are unable to easily find the information they are seeking.
First things first
The good news is that the majority of websites in our industry are now considered "mobile-friendly" and utilize responsive design (read our article on this topic). At least the websites we look at as an agency.
This should be considered a minimum web design standard at this point. If your website does not support responsive design then you are losing out on a significant amount of web leads and new business.
Every website we build for our clients at Landscape Leadership is either built on HubSpot, which has responsive design built in, or on Wordpress with a responsive theme.
Now with the majority of web traffic coming from mobile we will need to adapt our approach to web design and move to a "mobile-first" design approach.
Essentially, this means designing a site for a mobile device first and foremost and then considering how the website is experienced from a desktop or laptop device.
Or, as our Senior Project Manager, Emmett, explains:
"Instead of building for a desktop sized screen and creating media queries that tell the code what to do when accessed on a smaller screen, the code is first written for the smaller screen and media queries are added to tell the code what to do when accessed by desktop."
Hmm... okay.
Wrap up
I'm sure these numbers are not a surprise to you. So what to do about it...
First, make sure your website is responsive. If not, see about updating the site to a responsive theme. This isn't difficult or expensive.
Second, if you're embarking on a website overhaul in the coming months then you should consider a "mobile-first" approach to the design. Make sure you are working with a design/development company who embraces this approach.
If you want to learn more about our approach to website design for lawn and landscape companies you can schedule a meeting with us. If you want more insight like this you can subscribe to our blog. Just add your email address in the form below.
