With over 60% of searches on mobile devices rather than traditional computers, making your website attractive and accessible to these users is essential. It is now more important than ever to have Mobile Responsive Web Design because Google is now indexing your website for mobile first. This means that your ranking signals are now going to come from the mobile version of your site, not the desktop version.
While it is possible to create two sites – one specifically for desktops and one for mobile devices, a far easier solution is to make sure you use a responsive web design.
What is a responsive design?
Simply put, a website with responsive design is one that responds to how people are viewing it. Everything on the page will be visible at a size appropriate to the screen.
Why do I need a responsive design?
Here are three reasons
- Mobile device use is rising
Statistics show us that mobile device use is increasing rapidly.
- It can make things easier
With responsive design, you only need to change things on one website, and those changes are reflected everywhere.
- Google says so
Google is now using mobile first indexing.
Are there downsides to responsive design?
As with everything, there can be negatives to responsive design. If you already have a website, it can sometimes be time-consuming to convert it into responsive design.
Is Woocommerce Responsive when added to your website?
The default layout in Woocommerce is Responsive. I find that it requires a few tweaks here and there to everything looking beautiful in your ecommerce website.
Responsive web design is an approach to web design aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing and interaction experience—easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling—across a wide range of devices (from desktop computer monitors to mobile phones).
When I have to make some styling changes to integrate the Woocommerce plugin with an existing website using the Genesis Framework, I use the Genesis Style Trump plugin from Carrie Dills. This plugin ensures the stylesheet of your theme will over-write Woocommerce’s default stylesheet making it easy to add those style changes unique to your site.
And since I use Genesis, I also use Genesis Connect for Woocommerce to integrate the theme.
Is my website mobile responsive?
Here are some tools to help you test. Enter your website URL into this tester
https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly Click the analyse
More on Responsive Web Design and Ecommerce Websites
It’s interesting that mobile is still far behind desktop when it comes to making purchases on mobile devices ie people are not purchasing on their phones as frequently as their desktops.
Evidence abounds that mobile phones are still for upper-funnel shopping activities, with users more likely to close the deal in person or on a PC. – See more at: https://www.emarketer.com
Your ecommerce website needs to be mobile responsive for those upper funnel shopping activities such as awareness and interest.
Thinking about a Shopping funnel :
- Awareness – the customer is aware of the existence of a product or service
- Interest – actively expressing an interest in a product group
- Desire – aspiring to a particular brand or product
- Action – taking the next step towards purchasing the chosen product
Have you got a strategy for staying in touch with these potential customers browsing on mobile devices?