Is Your Responsive Site Killing Your Business?

You’ve probably heard that mobile is pretty popular.

Actually, in 2018, 52.2 percent of all website traffic worldwide was generated through mobile phones. That’s up from 50.3 percent in 2017. According to Statista, mobile currently accounts for half of all global web pages served.

So it stands to reason that you need to make your mobile site as good as possible – and not just to make the experience more pleasant. In 2017, mobile sales totalled 50% of ecommerce revenue in the United States, and smartphones held a 57% share of all retail website visits. Mobile makes bank.

It only takes a quick Google search – in the queue at the grocery store or waiting for a bus, perhaps – to find out that mobile is the new industry standard, but many still think it’s optional.

But as more and more people get on board and start making their sites mobile-responsive… this could actually be hurting sales instead of helping.

To find out why, we need to take a look at how mobile responsive sites work.

When a mobile browser accesses a site that content is “reflowed” – or rearranged and resized according to an algorithm, to fit everything into a mobile screen. It’s your exact same website, just squeezed and poked into smaller, stacking boxes.

But the problem is that there’s no industry standard size of smartphone screen, and there’s huge variety according to manufacturer or model. Your new iPad Pro counts as a mobile device, but so does your old Blackberry that lives in a drawer – and mobile-responsive sites will respond to them the same.

In theory, reflowing content means sites should display better (at least) on all screens – but this is precisely why it doesn’t work. Mobile-responsive is algorithmic: you have no control, and it doesn’t get everything right all the time. In short, it lacks a human touch… and even when things look OK, you’re still just adapting a desktop view for a mobile.

Hardly the mobile-first experience users are demanding. That isn’t too strong a word: nearly 8 in 10 customers would stop engaging with content that doesn’t display well on their device, according to Sweor. Not a case of minor inconvenience, or “oh well” – people will leave.

But there’s another way of displaying content for mobile. Advanced platforms like Unbound and Instapage are now shying away from mobile-responsive in favour of mobile-specific, and reaping the rewards.

Rather than using an algorithm to rearrange elements for every new screen size, mobile-specific uses a set of breakpoints determined by a human eye to create an alternate version that scales well on any screen size.

For example, in Convertri, the Page Builder is focused on the desktop version. But we also let you create an entirely different mobile version, where you can resize and rearrange elements. Then, when your page is accessed by a mobile browser, if the screen size hits the smaller breakpoint, it will automatically access the mobile version. But, if a larger tablet accesses your page, it will just show your scaled desktop page.

This means you don’t have a few lines of CSS sending elements off in random directions because it thinks that’s what looks better on a Samsung rather than an iPhone: you have a real, alternate version of your page, designed by human eyes for mobile.

It means you have full control. You can actively design the mobile experience – shift elements, hide or show others, and scale text for readability. You can prioritise elements – what do you want users to see first? – and take back your mobile site from the machines.

As more makes and models of smartphones hit the market, screen sizes are going to get more varied, and not just in size: curved, bezel-less and 3D screens are only a few years away. This means anyone not using mobile-specific sites will get left behind as users prefer an experience customised for them as humans.

If there’s one lesson to learn from mobile sites, it’s this: humanity still rules supreme.