Smartphones have completely taken over the market over the last decade. In 2013, Business Insider reported that 54 per cent of Americans owned a smartphone and 25%, tablets.
Nine years later, the number of tablets alone has overtaken the number of personal computers. That is why eCommerce businesses need to pay attention to their mobile users.
A mobile-friendly ecommerce store can be obtained by building a separate version for smartphone users. However, nowadays, this practice is outdated.
As outlined by BigCommerce in this blog post, ecommerce store builders are great for startups and new businesses, because they offer an easy platform for you to showcase your products. Moreover, they offer SEO-friendly features to acquire organic traffic to increase engagement and sales from shoppers using their mobile devices.
Here are five benefits you can enjoy by having a responsive online store built using a powerful ecommerce site builder:
- Search engines favor mobile-friendly stores
Google favors mobile-friendly websites in its search results. If your website isn’t optimized for smartphones, potential customers may not find you when they look for products or services on Google.
Yahoo, Bing and other search engines also favor responsive websites in their rankings. Why does every search engine favor mobile-friendly websites? Because a responsive website puts its user experience first.
A mobile-friendly website will fit on a smartphone screen perfectly. It will be easy to read, use and navigate. On the other hand, users will struggle to read the contents and navigate through if you have a desktop layout on smartphone screens.
- Cost savings
Responsive websites are cheaper than mobile-specific sites. A responsive website design costs less, because it doesn’t require additional development work. You need to ensure that your content is readable on all devices.
A responsive website will always win against adaptive designs in terms of return on investment. If you have an adaptive design, that means your website has two different layouts. When making an update or adding a new feature to your site, you will have to make the changes twice.
A lot of money and time will be invested to build and maintain the two stores. Depending on the platform you have built your store on, these costs could pile up to thousands of dollars per month.
To save on such costs and time, switch to a one-size-fits-all theme. Such designs will offer a great user experience on all devices regardless of their screen resolution and size. You will have less to maintain and code, which translates to a lot of money and time saved.
- Best site speed
The best way to ensure that your website loads fast is to create a mobile-friendly website. Your customers won’t mind waiting a few seconds before seeing what your product or service offers. However, they will mind waiting for too long.
Time is money, hence every second counts in the eCommerce world. According to research, half of internet users give up on a website that takes about 6 to 10 seconds to load. If you are serving mobile users with a desktop site, it will load many useless resources on mobile phones, adding significantly to the load time.
A lagging store will cost you potential customers and conversions. Not only will such a website lead to low revenues, but also poor SEO performance. Search engine bots will not be able to load your store for indexing purposes fully. Moreover, a faster loading site is also useful for voice search.
A responsive website solves this problem by optimizing image sizes and other elements such as text boxes, menus, etc. This optimization will lead to better site speed, traffic, conversions, and SEO.
- A competitive edge
Firstly, having a mobile-friendly store is not a new thing. The odds are that all your competitors have already optimized their websites. If you do not have a responsive website, you are at a disadvantage in ranking on SERP and bounce rates.
Secondly, if you use a website builder platform to build a shop with responsive design, you will be way ahead of any competitor who doesn’t have one. You will rank higher on the SERPs than them. A high rank means more traffic and conversions.
Thirdly, you will have the best user experience. Since your site is optimized for mobile, it will be more enjoyable for smartphone users.
For instance, a hamburger menu usually is available on mobile instead of desktop navigation. The text size also gets adjusted for the best view on small devices. Other things like the size of text fields are also changed to fit the smartphone screen perfectly. All the above things will add up and deliver the best user experience that your customers will not go unnoticed. Hence, you’re likely to see a lot more repeat customers and more sales than your competitors.
Conclusion
Ecommerce businesses need to have a responsive website. Both consumers and search engines now favor responsive websites. By creating a responsive website, you will gain even more benefits than those listed above.
