No, we don’t mean being communicative with your spouse, friends, or colleagues. (We are web designers and SEO specialists, not therapists …).
In today’s computer lingo, “Responsive” means: a mobile friendly website. Optimized for user-friendly display on (small) mobile devices, such as tablets and smart phones.
For those sites that are still not responsive (or not fully responsive), here are some sobering statistics. According to a Shopify survey, over 50% of all e-commerce transactions are now conducted on mobile devices. That was as of August 2014. Global figures supplied by Smartinsights) indicate this share has risen to about 55% by mid-2015. And it’s rising further.
This is of course mainly because mobile usage has increased dramatically during the past few years. But there is also Mobilegeddon. It’s a (somewhat sinister ) nickname for a new Google rule, rolled out this past April, but announced months before. Accordingly, Google will downgrade search result rankings for websites that are not responsive on smart phones.
This scare was enough to boost the share of responsive websites by almost 5% within just two months. Well, Google’s threats are usually taken seriously … Huge surprise, though: almost 40% (yes, forty per cent) of the Fortune 500 companies’ websites were not yet responsive as of April 2015. Don’t forget, these are not mom and pop stores; they are companies in the 10 billion to 100 billion Dollar class. So this is a shocking figure.
Just goes to show that size alone doesn’t guarantee perfection. And that well designed, responsive web sites of smaller businesses have a real shot at ranking higher on search results. Because an expert web designer will never build a non-responsive website. Who would want to make a website virtually inaccessible to more than half of all potential visitors (and, additionally, ruin its search results’ rankings)?
Of course, there are also many other factors that determine high search rankings. But being Responsive is right up there.
Questions? Comments? Challenges? Get in touch. We’re good listeners and are here to help.
