By now you probably have a mobile version of your website available for consumers to use. And if you don’t, you really need to get on the stick!
Back in 2011 Trulia was among the first of the portals to bring out a mobile-optimized app for the iPad and iPhone, with other platforms coming along later. Everyone else soon followed!
In the past few years all the major brands brought mobile optimized websites to their online offerings, and if you work for a brokerage that provides you with a website, you probably have a mobile optimized site available as well. Go ahead and take a moment to break out your phone and visit your website using the phone’s browser. You should soon see your site, but in a cleaner, scaled down version of your regular website.
Having a mobile optimized site is critical now, more so than ever. In a recent study, Comscore stated “Mobile Exceeds PC Internet usage for the first time in history. In early 2014, the landscape in which businesses operate changed forever when Internet usage on mobile devices exceeded PC usage.”
So, we know that people are using their phones to surf the web. You probably have a mobile site, so you are good to go, right?
Not so fast! In fact, that is what users of your site may be saying when they try to pull up your site. If your site has not been specifically engineered to work well on phones, it may load slowly, or even worse, it may load bandwidth heavy items that the consumer will have to pay for as part of their phone’s data usage plan.
Bet you hadn’t considered that have you? In fact, every piece of data that a phone downloads will count against the user’s monthly data usage plan. Up until now it’s been hard to determine just how much a particular website would “cost” a user. I ran across a site that will download your site and then apply cost factors to it to determine, on average, just what it costs the user to use your site.
If you will take a few minutes to click the link here: http://whatdoesmysitecost.com/ you can see what people around the wold are paying just to see your content! Be a good web citizen and have your web provider take the steps to reduce the overhead of downloading your site. Go ahead and check out your competitors websites while you are at it. Doing so will give you a target to go after. You may not need to have an extremely lightweight and fast downloading site…you may only need to be better than your competition.
Go ahead, check it out, make the changes, after all, the mobile web is NOT going away.
