Are You Checking Your Website on Your Phone?

by Charles Pobee-Mensah, Director of Digital Marketing For a jeweler, checking your website is work. And most jewelers have computers for doing work. So, most of the time when jewelers check their websites, it’s on a computer. But is that how your customers view your website? Nope.

Your Customers Find You On Their Phones

Ok, it’s not literally all of them. But it’s enough of them to make you want to change your habits. We see between 50-75% of website traffic coming from mobile devices, not including tablets. That should be enough to make you say, “What does it look like on mobile?” any time you’re reviewing changes on your website.

The Mobile First Movement

For a while now, many web developers have adopted the mantra “mobile first”. You see it everywhere in their circles. It means not just checking websites with mobile devices in mind, but designing them for mobile devices first, then expanding the design to work with desktop computers. That’s how important mobile design is for website developers. The challenges of designing for a mobile phone are unique.

The layout is vertical, not horizontal
There is less space on the screen
The phones aren’t as fast as computers
Wireless isn’t as fast as Wi-Fi
Bloated websites use up more of your data plan
Phones don’t use a mouse or trackpad
Google ranks your mobile site separate from your desktop

The list goes on and on.

Start Checking It On Mobile

We’ve worked with enough retail jewelers to know this. Usually, the criteria that we’re held to by clients is based on how things look on desktop, without a second thought about how it turned out on mobile. This is a problem and it incentivizes the wrong thinking. Sometimes the customers’ experience on mobile is made worse because of a change made in favor of the desktop experience. But you wouldn’t know that if you never checked. We recently had an experience when a client caught an issue with the mobile version of a new page before we did. We were shocked, but also proud. We wish moments like this would happen more often in fact. It means that our jewelers are paying attention and it keeps us on our toes.

Make Checking Your Mobile Site Easy

Checking your site on your phone can be a pain sometimes. If you are already on your desktop checking your email and get a link to a new page on the site, it’s easiest just to click it and take a look. Here’s a quick tip to make checking your mobile site easier. Go ahead and click the link to view it on your desktop. But this time, you’re going to view it using the “mobile view” in your browser's developer tools. Developer tools are built into every major browser and are made for website developers to troubleshoot issues. But you can use it to take a look at how your website will look on a phone. To open developer tools on Google Chrome, you can use the keyboard shortcut CTR+SHIFT+I on Windows (CMD+SHIFT+I on Mac). Then you can either click the little icon that looks like a phone and tablet or use the keyboard shortcut CTR+SHIFT+M (CMD+SHIFT+M on Mac) to open the mobile view. Repeat the keyboard shortcut to close, or click the “X” in the developer tools window. There are similar settings for all major browsers. Here are walkthroughs on how to do if you don’t use Chrome.

Mobile - Your New Must

Whether you use your phone or your browser’s built-in developer tools, checking things in mobile is a must. You wouldn’t judge the experience of your store from how it looks from the back entrance. In the same way, the experience of your website should be judged based on how most people most often see it. In today’s world, that’s mobile. Want to work with an agency that knows how to think through your website experience? Contact suits@fruchtman.com.