An online presence is a necessary and standard part of operating a modern business in an increasingly digital world. This has been the case for years, as the home internet rose from a niche concept to a ubiquitous tool. While most businesses understand this much, many fail to appreciate just how far mobiles have come in usurping the former leaders of desktops and laptops for internet access.
Today, it’s more important than ever for businesses to understand and cater their online presence to mobile platforms first. This can mean re-examining what you’ve already built and adapting existing systems to better suit users on smartphone and tablet devices.
By the Numbers
According to modern measurements, over 60% of all website traffic in 2024 comes from mobile devices. More than 92% of smartphone users access the internet via their mobiles, with around 4.3 billion active mobile users online. This means that computers are no longer the de facto option, they’re now the alternative.
For comparison, the amount of traffic coming from mobiles back in 2011 was a mere 6%, reaching 37% by 2015. While we don’t know where this percentage could eventually rest, it’s a safe assumption that mobiles will maintain their lead in internet access patterns.
Adapting a Whole System
The key to updating your presence to mobiles is that you can’t just change over one or two elements, every part of your online system needs to be streamlined. This starts with basic image resolutions and page scaling and includes formatting for user information, links between pages, and other updateable aspects of user experience and user interface design.
This might seem like a daunting task, but thanks to the flexibility of modern HTML5, it’s not as difficult as you might think. Consider as a prime example the online casino industry, which includes many websites that have changed tack to support mobile accessibility first. This casino welcome bonus page displays a perfect illustration of what needs to be done. Graphics for bonuses like tournaments and free spins target smaller displays and then scale up, control bars similarly change location and size depending on the display, and control for touch screens is never cramped.
Some websites, like social media, will do most of the heavy lifting for you. The user experience here has already been tailored by companies like Instagram and Facebook to target mobile systems. It’s just up to you to modify the image size and text formatting so that it’s always clear for users on any device.
Websites can be slightly trickier and need to be tested each step of the way to ensure they maintain usability. Remember that you’re not just targeting a standard iPhone screen, you also need to take into account tablets, folding phones, flip phones, and more esoteric resolutions. As long as you test your designs on these sizes before pushing a website live, you can be confident in the result.
Keeping up to date with web designs is a never-ending process. Changing standards and systems means you should constantly pay attention to how new websites display themselves, and consider what lessons you can learn from their successes and mistakes. To ensure a reliable click-through rate and maintain your professional image on the web, a continual adaption to mobile platforms is a must.
