Going Mobile - Advice Requested
-
Hi, I run a website called tvfoodmaps.com. We currently have a desktop website and a mobile app (native apps). However the largest community of our users tend to use our desktop site on their mobile phones. Our bounce rate is about 12% higher for mobile devices than desktop users and our pages per visit drops by almost 50% from desktop to mobile. My hypothesis is that mobile users when presented with a "designed for desktop" site are more likely to leave since the navigation isn't as natural.
I'm considering investing in either a responsive design for the site or a dedicated mobile site and wanted the communities input on what metrics I should be looking at to determine "is it worth it"? Or should I just stick with service the desktop version to the mobile users?
-
I work with a developer who is doing this for a site.
He is using a WP plugin and then slicing.
I agree that around $200 is a reasonable cost under such circumstances.
PM me for details.
-
Are you aware of any places I could get a quote on how much it would cost to have someone take a few pages of my site and "slice" them?
-
My plan wasn't really a minimal m. site, but a site that is fully optimized for high end devices - sort of how m.yelp.com works. My current site does load much slower on the phone than on the desktop. My concern with just slicing up the existing site may not be as much of an improvement from a performance standpoint as I may need to change how much data is loaded and other aspects of the site for mobile.
-
The site is not on wordpress, everything was coded from scratch.
-
With big screen mobiles the old mimimal m. designs are less important but it is still critical to have fast page load times. If you have GA you can page load averages by browsers so you can see if mobile browsers are a lot slower. A slow site may well affect your bounce. There is a great blog post on the impact of site speed on mobile traffic at http://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/
Also note that page speed (at least to first byte) affects search ranking see http://moz.com/blog/how-website-speed-actually-impacts-search-ranking so always important to optimise this.
Hope that helps?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Advice on estate agent website SEO next steps
Hi everyone, I have been working on the SEO for this website for a while now and have had a good amount of success increasing the traffic and rankings. However our main hurdle is improving conversions on the actual website - we want to encourage more people to book a valuation. Does anybody have any suggestions on how we can improve this? The website is www.richardkendall.co.uk Thank you
Web Design | | sophiecrosby970 -
Is switching from a very old HTML table site to HTML5 going to make a big difference
Hello, My site owner has been having calls that our old HTML site needs to switch to HTML5. Is it really worth the ubgrade from an archaic HTML site? Please explain. Bob
Web Design | | BobGW0 -
Going mobile: Responsive or different mobile version?
Going mobile: Responsive or different mobile version?
Web Design | | FCRMediaLietuva
Which one should we choose? Should we do responsive design or should we have a different mobile version and go m.domain.com ? http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2253965/3-reasons-why-responsive-web-design-is-the-best-option-for-your-mobile-seo-strategy I just read this article. It seems that the responsive design is OK, but the first comment kills that opinion and says that it is pretty hard to make it OK. 🙂 So I need more opinions? What is best for people and for SEO?0 -
Mobile website strategy
Hello all! This question is about mobile websites. Any suggestions are welcomed. The facts: We have recently built a mobile website for our business using the separate mobile urls (parallel mobile website on a m. sub-domain). We are in the service industry and while our customers are most of the time on the go, it is important for them to find the price and order the service as fast and easy as possible. The redirect from desktop to mobile happens when customers are accessing the website with a mobile devices and it's done automatically. The mobile version does not have any content and serves only as a search and order function. The SEO has been made for the desktop website only and we are ranking really well for all competitive keywords in our niche. We want to keep the mobile website simple and clean so we are not planning to add any content on it.The questions: Since we are not planning to have much content on the mobile website, do we need to do any SEO for it? If yes, why? What are the benefits? Should we add content on the mobile website and why? Is there any down-side from an SEO perspective due to the fact that the website redirects to the mobile version? How are the inbound links going to behave in this case? Do we need to link these two websites although there is no risk about duplicate content? (links, canonical tags, sitemaps) Will the mobile website take advantage of the link building made for the desktop version? Should we allow the mobile website to be indexed having the fact that this is just a search & book tool? (at the moment it is blocked via robots.txt) Thanks for reading, looking forward to your answers.
Web Design | | echo10 -
Any advice for best practice for mobile versions of websites?
Hi Mozzers, I am looking to develop a mobile version of one of my sites and was wondering what was considered best practice for the following: Where to host it: m.domain.com or domain.com/mobile ? Is rel='canonical' enough to avoid mobile version being indexed or should I use "noindex" on mobile version? How to handle tablets? Which screen size sees mobile version? Which sees full site version? Thanks in advance Geoff
Web Design | | SEM-Freak1 -
How to serve a Mobile & Full Site using one URL?
Hello, Does anyone know of any resources or tutorials that outline how to serve a smartphone-formatted website using the same URL as the full site? I know that one solution is using media-queries to serve a seperate CSS stylesheet, but you still have the full HTML source code. In other words, I might want to serve a smartphone & desktop user different content, but under one URL. WP Touch (Wordpress Plugin) is a perfect example of what I mean, but how is it technically achieved? It serves two different sets of HTML for smartphone & full, but using one URL http://www.bravenewcode.com/store/plugins/wptouch-pro/
Web Design | | petecampbell-bmi0 -
Advice regarding Panda
I'd like some feedback on what would be a Panda factor(s) on http://www.duhaime.org The site got hit fairly hard by Panda (60% drop in traffic). Since then we have: redesigned the site (responsive and progressive), reduce the average links/page to ~35 from over 100, Use AJAX to delay the loading of boiler plate and nav elements, Improved the search functionality, Added more content images (still in progress), Removed the citations section to new sub-domain, and 1000's of little code fixes and enhancements The site, by nature of being a legal reference, contains many small, single topic pages. The authority and professionalism of the site demands it doesn't allow much UGC. (The law is not Social Media) Unfortunately, this means the bulk of the page (1000+) are fairly formulaic - to format otherwise would diminish the value to the user. This doesn't hurt many individual pages as shown by the dominance the "Without Prejudice" page enjoys. In particular, the citations section was very limited as there is not very much one can say about the 10,000+ law reports in the world. Recognizing this as valuable to lawyers but a likely "low value" target of Panda, we moved it to a sub domain and requested the old directory was removed from the index. This was done on July 28th. Now... I'd like some opinions on anything else that might be holding the site back. Thank you for you time.
Web Design | | sprynewmedia0 -
Recommendation for a company to make a site more mobile friendly?
Hiya, We have a client who uses us for SEO, and a separate company for web development. They have a fairly large site on a bespoke CMS. They're happy with the site, but the user experience on mobile devices is not right. Can anybody recommend a company specializing in that area? Preferably a UK company but not essential. Thanks 🙂
Web Design | | SteveOllington1
