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Why should you give your ecommerce website a ‘mobile-first’ design?

It’s easy to underestimate how many people today access online stores via mobile devices rather than desktop and laptop computers. In 2021’s first quarter, mobile phones were responsible for roughly 55% of global website traffic; that’s up from the share of about 50% recorded in early 2017.

It shouldn’t overly surprise, then, that reengineering an ecommerce site to make it ‘mobile-first’ can help you to…

Catch web users where they actually are

Whereas desktops and laptops tend to be tied to specific places, mobile phones usually go wherever their owners go. When someone suddenly thinks “I’d like to buy that”, they can act on that wish by whipping out their handset.

If your online store has been carefully designed to accommodate mobile users, then this store will hopefully be more effective at capturing spur-of-the-moment purchases like this.

Show your customers you put their needs first

Every year, as new smartphones are introduced complete with features like hi-res screens, biometric authentication technology and augmented reality (AR) capabilities, it seems that customers’ expectations for what they can do online increases.

Hence, you should be quick to capitalise on these technological advances – such as by allowing customers to use mobile payment services like Apple Pay and view products in AR form.

Aesthetically streamline your website

Traditionally, mobile-first websites have been designed in a somewhat stripped-down manner to prevent them from looking too cluttered on the smaller screens of mobile devices.

However, you might not have realised that optimising your ecommerce site primarily for mobile viewers would bode well for how that site looks on desktop and laptop displays as well.

Improve your online store’s SEO ranking

With Google having switched to what it calls ‘mobile-first indexing’ for new websites it crawls, the implication is clear: if you are launching an ecommerce site afresh, it must be mobile-first. Otherwise, it could too easily lose out in search rankings to other websites that are.

Prioritise how you arrange content on your website

What do your site’s visitors most want to see on it? Once you know the answer to that, you can proceed to position that content prominently.

This is a solid principle of achieving good mobile-first design – and, once you have stripped out superfluous elements from your website, customers will be able to navigate its pages and buy from it more quickly.

Surpass ecommerce sites falling short of mobile-first

If you have read this far into the article, we can safely say you now have a good insight into the importance of mobile-first web design. However, as some businesses have not yet implemented mobile-first design for their ecommerce sites, you can build a strong competitive advantage.

As we have acknowledged, mobile phones are the most popular type of devices for visiting and browsing websites. So, if someone peruses various online stores online and finds that yours is the easiest to use on their device, they will naturally be inclined to make their online purchase from that site. We can even make your ecommerce site mobile-first for you!

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