In order to appease Google's new mobile friendly algorithm, business owners and web designers have been rushing to "convert" their websites as quickly and cheaply as possible, without thinking about the usability factors required to make a website truly mobile friendly.
- You get mobile websites that serve massive graphics that take forever to load on mobile.
- You get mobile E-commerce websites with usability disasters during checkout.
- You get responsive websites with key visuals scaled down to minuscule promotions
- You get websites with less information and content available on entry
- You get to play hide and seek with hamburger navigation
- You get hosting companies offering free utilities and low cost services to convert website to mobile "point and click"
- You get websites where the full version is still more friendly.
Sure, a high quality mobile website can be a great way to improve key performance metrics. Businesses typically see increased conversation rates, decreased bounce rates etc. with their mobile users.
But only when the mobile website is done "right".
With businesses rushing to get this done ASAP there's a good chance it's not being done right - even if they still get that shiny green checkmark from Google.
And if the "full website" is performing just fine with mobile users, what's the rush to offer a separate version?
Google said so I suppose. Even it means a less friendly website.
- You get mobile E-commerce websites with usability disasters during checkout.
To be fair, I think going through desktop-version checkout process on mobile is very much worse. If an e-commerce company can't get its checkout process right, then it deserves to lose customers.
At least when I use the desktop site I am confident that all of the site's functionality is available, and that the interface is probably not just broken and unusable due to bugs, which is surprisingly common on mobile websites. I guess people don't test mobile websites as much, and the increased dynamicity of mobile layouts and diversity of behavior among mobile browsers increases the probability of bugs...
- You get mobile websites that serve massive graphics that take forever to load on mobile.
- You get mobile E-commerce websites with usability disasters during checkout.
- You get responsive websites with key visuals scaled down to minuscule promotions
- You get websites with less information and content available on entry
- You get to play hide and seek with hamburger navigation
- You get hosting companies offering free utilities and low cost services to convert website to mobile "point and click"
- You get websites where the full version is still more friendly.
Sure, a high quality mobile website can be a great way to improve key performance metrics. Businesses typically see increased conversation rates, decreased bounce rates etc. with their mobile users.
But only when the mobile website is done "right".
With businesses rushing to get this done ASAP there's a good chance it's not being done right - even if they still get that shiny green checkmark from Google.
And if the "full website" is performing just fine with mobile users, what's the rush to offer a separate version?
Google said so I suppose. Even it means a less friendly website.