It is now official – there are more visits to most web sites from mobile devices than those starting their browsing on the desktop. It’s now more than half of all web traffic originating from phones and tablets. Google is also reporting that 60% or all search traffic is mobile. This means it’s time to take your mobile traffic very seriously and do everything possible to make your business blog and your public facing web site work very well and perform even better on phones and tablets.
We also continue to invest in the mobile web—which is a vital source of traffic for the vast majority of websites. Over this past year, Google has worked closely with publishers, developers, and others in the ecosystem to help make the mobile web a smoother, faster experience for users. A good example is the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project, which we launched as an open-source initiative in partnership with news publishers, to help them create mobile-optimized content that loads instantly everywhere. The other example is Progressive Web Apps (PWA), which combine the best of the web and the best of apps—allowing companies to build mobile sites that load quickly, send push notifications, have home screen icons, and much more. Sundar Pichai – CEO
One piece of the mobile usability puzzle is page load speed and Google has made a huge commitment to making your site speedier than you might imagine possible. That project is mentioned above in the quote from Sundar Pichai – it’s called AMP (for Accelerated Mobile Pages) and requires a bit of an additional commitment from site owners as well. There is an additional bit of coding required to fully implement AMP, which means there will need to be an investment of time and resources from businesses who want to participate. If you’ve ever seen the tiny lightning bolt and “AMP” next to search results at Google, that indicates the site has implemented that additional bit of coding on their pages. It basically lets Google cache and serve your images and scripts for mobile sites.
Fortunately for those using WordPress, it’s possible to incorporate that additional code using an AMP plug-in. Because mobile is so important and because Google is placing such a big emphasis on AMP, we’d be glad to help implement that plug-in for you and highly recommend you consider using it where possible.
Google has also now announced that their search index will emphasize mobile first over desktop by favoring sites that are mobile friendly and optimized for great user experience on all mobile devices. To demonstrate their seriousness on the importance of mobile usability they’ve offered tools to help you determine if your site is mobile friendly. Now, given all of the above, can you honestly say that your business has put the proper amount of attention on this issue? Contact us.
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