One question we keep hearing from business owners: should we get an app or a mobile site? Usually it comes up because someone in the family has announced that nobody uses computers anymore. That is not entirely wrong. More of the people visiting our clients’ websites are on phones every month, and for some businesses, like restaurants and local services, phones are already a big share of visits. But the answer is usually neither an app nor a separate mobile site. For most small businesses, it is a responsive website.
Here is how we explain the options, and why we have settled on responsive design for nearly every small business site we build on WordPress.
Three ways to handle mobile visitors
1. Do nothing
Your desktop site shows up on a phone, shrunk down. People pinch and zoom to read anything. Buttons are tiny. Menus that open when you hover the mouse don’t work at all with a finger. Plenty of Delhi business websites are still like this, and you can feel the frustration when you try to find a phone number on one while standing on the road.
2. A separate mobile site
This is the “m-dot” approach, where phone users are sent to a different version of the site, often at an address like m.yoursite.com. It is a stripped-down site built just for small screens. Big companies have done this for years, and some still do it well.
3. Responsive design
One website, one address, one set of content. The layout rearranges itself depending on the size of the screen. On a laptop you might see three columns. On a tablet, two. On a phone, one column with bigger buttons and a menu that folds into a single icon. The text and photos are the same. Only the arrangement changes.
Why we recommend responsive for small businesses
You only update one site
This is the practical reason that matters most. A small business usually has one person, often the owner, who updates the website when the menu changes or a new service is added. With a separate mobile site, that person has to remember to update both. In our experience, they don’t. Six months later the mobile site has last year’s prices and an old phone number, and nobody notices until a customer complains.
Google prefers it
Google has said publicly that responsive design is its recommended setup for sites that want to work well on smartphones. It supports separate mobile sites too, but they need extra technical work so Google understands that the two versions are the same content: special tags linking the pages, correct redirects for each page, and so on. When this is done wrong, which happens often on cheap builds, you can end up with phone users sent to the mobile home page instead of the page they searched for. That is a poor experience, and it doesn’t help your rankings either.
Links and shares stay simple
When someone shares a page from your site on Facebook or WhatsApp, the person who opens it might be on a phone or a laptop. With one responsive site, the same link works properly for both. With a separate mobile site, a link copied from a phone can open the mobile version on a desktop, looking odd and empty on a big screen.
It costs less over time
A responsive site may cost a little more to design and test at the start, because the designer has to plan for several screen sizes. But you are paying for one site, one set of updates, one hosting setup. A separate mobile site is effectively a second website with its own maintenance.
When a separate mobile site can make sense
We are not religious about this. There are cases where a separate mobile experience is reasonable, such as a large e-commerce business with a team to maintain it, or a site where mobile users need a very different set of features from desktop users. If you have a big development team and a clear reason, a dedicated mobile version can be fast and focused.
For a restaurant, a clinic, a school, a boutique or a consultancy, we have not yet met that reason.
What about an app?
An app is a different question. People download apps for things they use often, like their bank, a taxi service or a shopping site they buy from every week. Very few people will download an app for a restaurant they visit twice a year or a clinic they go to when they are ill. Build a website that works well on phones first. If your customers start asking for an app, that is the time to talk about one.
Remember the phones people really use
When we test sites, we don’t only use the latest iPhone. Many of your customers are on low-cost Android phones with smaller screens, on 2G or patchy 3G connections, sometimes using browsers like Opera Mini that compress pages to save data. A site that looks beautiful on the designer’s phone in the office can be slow and broken on these.
So we check a few things on every responsive build:
- Can you tap the phone number to call?
- Is the address and a map link easy to find from the first screen?
- Do images load reasonably quickly on a slow connection, or are we sending a huge photo to a small screen?
- Can you read the text without zooming?
- Does the menu open and close properly with a thumb?
- Do forms work, with fields big enough to type into?
The question isn’t whether your site looks good on a phone. It is whether someone can find what they came for in under a minute on one.
If you are on WordPress already
Good news. Many newer WordPress themes are responsive out of the box, including the default Twenty Fourteen theme that came with WordPress 3.8 in December, and WordPress’s own dashboard now works far better on phones and tablets than it used to. If your site runs on an older theme from three or four years ago, it is probably not responsive. Switching to a well-built responsive theme can be cheaper than you expect, but it is not just a click of a button. Menus, widgets and page layouts often need to be set up again, and content needs checking on every screen size.
If you are not sure what you have, open your website on your phone right now and try to call yourself from it. That one test tells you most of what you need to know.
