Help! My website is terrible on a phone browser!

Egads! People are browsing your website on their phone!

Alright, full disclosure: as much as I like to think of myself as a neo-phile (love of the new), age and human nature are moving me solidly into the neo-phobe (fear of the new) camp. This reveals itself from time to time by a form a denial I put myself through, when I start to see yet another “next-new-web-trend” emerge.

As a web designer and a website owner, I sometimes am impacted very much like my clients are when it comes to website obsolescence. Websites built a mere 4-5 years ago will all have much-needed upgrades in order to perform well in this new space in which we find ourselves.

I’m talking about the mobile browser universe.

Now many of you might be thinking “Meh, I don’t really do a lot of serious browsing on my phone. It’s nice if it’s there, but I prefer the big-screen browsing experience on my PC”

If you are saying the above, you are either in North America and/or you are older than 35.

While you and I were happily enjoying our big-screen web experience, the rest of the world quietly embraced mobile browsing at a fevered pitch! It’s not as though I was caught completely unaware. I watched the trend, but continued to think this was mainly the problem of owners of theater and restaurant websites.

I was wrong.

There are really two problems: the size of the screen and how it handles layout elements, but also, the size in kilobytes or even megabytes of these website elements. Often over connections with limited data plans, savvy phone browsing requires the user to evaluate the efficiency of your website. Most savvy browsers I know will skip heavy bandwidth sites or even sites with complicated front-ends, such as news sites, or ad-heavy sports sites. Now our design team loves images, and we try to maintain high visual quality. But this led to some larger file sizes and load times throughout our previous site design.

When I started to realize how regularly my website traffic reports were showing me mobile browser activity, I finally had to admit it: people browsing our (web design!) website on their phones were having a crummy experience. And there were a lot of them doing this, despite my self-assurances to the contrary.

Depending on the mobile browser, large swaths of our older website were even completely non-functional.

Don’t underestimate the power of this mobile browser usage to change how we all have to look at our websites. Many of you may have read my Top 5 Must Haves for a Modern Website. The responsive design that I outlined there, is the critical element for mobile browsing that most of us either have had to accommodate, or will have to accommodate very soon. And that’s the point.

Think of yourself as an internet user. Do you tolerate non-functional websites? Unless I’m on a specific destination site, strange behavior or non-functioning content will send me packing faster than any other factor.

This is not really up for debate. Websites must account for this sea-change in our internet viewing habits and screen sizes, or risk losing viewership and potential revenue.