Avoid Sidewalk Catastrophes: Optimize Your Mobile Website

Trips, falls, and head-on collisions. These days, a quick stroll down the street is an accident waiting to happen. It’s easy to point fingers at uneven pavement, crazed skateboarders, or fanny-packed tourists, but the truth of the matter is clear: smartphones are the culprit. Young, old, commuter, tourist, sometimes even bikers (yikes!) – everyone is face down, glued to their mobile device. While the act of walking-and-browsing can be aggravating, it speaks to a very important truth: mobile web is pervasive. Improving your mobile website will not only help prevent sidewalk catastrophes, it will also help create an optimized experience that generates more clickthroughs, revenue, and conversions.

Here’s where mobile testing comes in.

Mobile versions of target.com, reddit.com and taskrabbit.com.

A/B testing the mobile/tablet experience of your website is a huge growth opportunity for your business. Here are the top three reasons why you should be testing mobile.
Top three reasons to optimize your mobile website:

1. Increased Mobile Traffic: Not only do more people own smartphones, but those owners are also spending more time and accessing more sites on their mobile devices. They’re reading product reviews on the bus, streaming music at work, watching video over lunch, and making purchases of both virtual and physical goods – anytime, anywhere. Testing your mobile site allows you to maximize the value from this increasingly large and dynamic user-base.

2. Less Screen Real Estate: Strapped for pixels, a poorly designed mobile site might mean users literally cannot see what they’re looking for. Users spend more time zooming , twisting, and reconfiguring their screens in a desperate attempt to get the message. (Warning: these actions may increase the risk of walk-n-browse accidents). Cluttered mobile experiences make users more likely to give up and move on to something else. Extraneous elements that take up 5% of screen real estate on a desktop site may take up 20% on your mobile site. A/B/N testing allows you to identify the extraneous elements on your mobile site and optimize every square inch.

3. Slower Connections: Even with the increased availability of 4G LTE and Wi-Fi hotspots, accessing the web from a mobile device is still almost always slower than a desktop computer. Slower connections mean users want to load fewer pages and find what they’re looking for more quickly on each page they load. Testing will help you determine the best way to increase the prominence of the important parts of the page and prevent users from bouncing.

Simply put, if you’re not testing your mobile site, you’re missing a huge growth opportunity for your business. At least make your buttons big enough so the stubby fingered people can still walk-and-browse properly.