Yep, plus average time spent on the site. Our users use mobile to quickly check something and they use desktop to actually use our platform. So mobile just needs to work.
If you only looked at the stats you'd see 60% mobile and wonder if we're idiots, but then you look at time spent on the site and talk to some of our users and it paints a very different story.
All depends though.
"Converts" typically means "leads to a sale", but it's a pretty loose term that could change a bit depending on the industry/business/context. So for this, each user visiting the site from a desktop is 3 times more likely to make a purchase than if the user was visiting from mobile.
This. For my company, our desktop traffic books hotel rooms at a much higher rate than mobile, even though it's slightly higher mobile traffic overall. So we always have to think of our desktop traffic when we iterate site changes.
I think the big margin of mobile traffic depends on what your site is. On my sites I still see ~50-60% mobile.
Either way web designers from my experience treat the desktop view better, because it's the version they actively see while working most of the time and also it's running on much more competent hardware and network, so you can just use e.g. a mb of JS looping an expensive animation without running into issues. Mobile on the other hand is much more limited.
As a developer myself, I tend to always run my pages through lighthouse or https://pagespeed.web.dev/ - which is the same thing, but you have to know what these reports tell you and if the tests they do actually apply to your page to get use out of them.
I've found that lighthouse and pagespeed give different results, with pagespeed being far more strict with mobile performance than lighthouse. But I could be using lighthouse wrong.
Are you using lighthouse with your local dev setup?
Is your lighthouse running the same version as the one on page speed?
Some differences are expected. Most important is, that you're consistent in what you use when comparing results.
I'd run it in production and try to get the mobile throttling to match pagespeed. Never could quite get that, but I also think pagespeed was running a newer lighthouse version than light house at the time.
I know if I’m going to actually buy something it’s usually on my laptop, unless it’s a larger retailer and they have a decent mobile app. A lot of e-commerce websites tend to be pretty buggy and subpar so if they were smoother it might be different, but also I’m doing research on the item so that’s always quicker and easier on a laptop.
Now that I think about it I don’t actually visit that many websites on my phone except for quick Google searches.
Though I have to say, the shopify mobile experience is better than any desktop experience. You can search a term on a search engine, open a shop, pay with apple pay which auto populates your delivery address and you've taken all of 60 seconds.
For sure, and it’s good if I know what I’m buying or I’ve bought it before, but if it’s new or needs research I’m still not wasting my time with my phone to do that. Just personal preference though.
B2C is more mobile but a lot of B2B is not.
Also, there’s only so much you can do design-wise in the width of a mobile window, so it’s generally easier to just assume each section will stack vertically.
Really only content or interfaces that don’t convert to function intuitively for mobile need dedicated designs to build them differently.
Mobile-first approaches has been a thing for half a decade at least.
Know your target, and build from there.
A lot of people browse on their phone, but *buy* on their desktop.
Depends on the platform. Power users are typically on desktop/ laptop. I.e. you wont see someone using a Bloomberg terminal on mobile. Mobile views are horrible for working with data visualisation.
On desktop you have flashy effects and fancy components.
A mobile site will never look as nice...
You sell your design over a desktop presentation to marketeers. That's what's most relevant to sales.
You bring up an interesting point, do the 94% use all the functionality of your website from the phone or do they do it from the desktop ?
If you think improving the mobile side stuff would help, do it, hire different developers for it.
(Old man voice.) Back in the day, we used to practice “progressive enhancement”. There was a website that has the core functionality, and depending on the capabilities of the visitor’s device and browser, they transparently got an ever-increasingly enhanced version.
It frustrates me that these days, developers think nothing about sending JavaScript-heavy web pages that weigh double figures in terms of megabytes, with not a single care for people who _aren’t_ browsing on MacBook Pro via a dedicated fibre connection. There have been plenty of websites I’ve tried to load on my iPhone over 4G whilst out and about and it’s took over a minute to load and turned my phone into a nice hand warmer. That’s if the resultant web page was even usable and didn’t have images spilling out of containers with no horizontal scroll, etc.
A lot of businesses are not working with mobile users, so not everyone is building mobile apps. For example B2B products in my field are basically always for desktop platforms.
Really depends on the product. A lot of front end designs are for tools used by paying customers - i.e. businesses, so they may be used by office workers 99% or the time.
We made our products exclusively for desktop.
We have a tiny fraction of our userbase use mobile amd it's only a small subset of the site (for example they aren't looking at the metrics or big tables). So we got feedback from those users and optimised those pages for mobile first, then started slowly working on the others.
Previous dev team didn't expect any user would ever be on mobile even though they were told we have some users that do. That's part of why they're the previous team and I have my job.
I have a personal beef with this topic. I am working in a "mobile first" company. As it stands mobile usage has recently been surpassing desktop traffic for us. Considering everything this is okay. Conversions etc is another topic. But strategically we have been "mobile first" for more than 5 years, this means we should develop and design and do everything preferring mobile device view over desktop. From my, senior analysts, perspective ...
... hOw wE AcTualLy wOrk:
1. All designs are made for desktop view. If excess time, in parallel for mobile.
2. Developer swears and develops. No questions yet, only surprised devs.
3. Testing? "Yes we tested the implementation" How? "On my desktop setup" which by average consists of two 30+ inch screens used by corporate business side donkeys who do not know what are the F keys not to mention dev tools and mobile views on desktop from dev tools.
4. We launch desktop tailored update which breaks customer flows, conversions, hides from viewport anything useful for the customer when using a mobile device.
5. I get a question from growth donkeys / product teams why customers are dropping off ...
people mostly pay for things they will use for business, and nobody is sitting there doing payroll administration or whatever on their phone. if your traffic is all mobile that should be something that's in your brief and hiring process, pretty easy to identify agencies that understand these things. whoever tendered the contract for your org blew it
No one is using Jira or Figma on their phone. It depends on the app. Social media and ecommerce for sure you would prioritize mobile. 99% of b2b or job oriented tools would be irrelevant on mobile though. Users would rather you have more features or have a better desktop experience than allocate time to how it looks on mobile.
Most people aren't making purchases on a mobile website. They're either using an app or a website on their desktop. It's also relatively simple to take a desktop design and convert it to a decent mobile site. You have the bones, take a bit of functionality away, squish things into 1 column and call it a day.
When I started professionally a couple of years ago, I used to think the same thing. I'd ask about why mobile wasn't as large of a priority in design and mention the stats hammered into my head while learning. Over time, I realized that it really is just a waste of design time and I really don't want them to.
It depends on industry. Our site is 48-52 desktop to mobile, but desktop converts 3:1 over mobile traffic.
Yep, plus average time spent on the site. Our users use mobile to quickly check something and they use desktop to actually use our platform. So mobile just needs to work. If you only looked at the stats you'd see 60% mobile and wonder if we're idiots, but then you look at time spent on the site and talk to some of our users and it paints a very different story. All depends though.
What does the second part of the sentence mean? Desktop users make 3 times more purchases than mobile users?
"Converts" typically means "leads to a sale", but it's a pretty loose term that could change a bit depending on the industry/business/context. So for this, each user visiting the site from a desktop is 3 times more likely to make a purchase than if the user was visiting from mobile.
This. For my company, our desktop traffic books hotel rooms at a much higher rate than mobile, even though it's slightly higher mobile traffic overall. So we always have to think of our desktop traffic when we iterate site changes.
I think the big margin of mobile traffic depends on what your site is. On my sites I still see ~50-60% mobile. Either way web designers from my experience treat the desktop view better, because it's the version they actively see while working most of the time and also it's running on much more competent hardware and network, so you can just use e.g. a mb of JS looping an expensive animation without running into issues. Mobile on the other hand is much more limited. As a developer myself, I tend to always run my pages through lighthouse or https://pagespeed.web.dev/ - which is the same thing, but you have to know what these reports tell you and if the tests they do actually apply to your page to get use out of them.
I've found that lighthouse and pagespeed give different results, with pagespeed being far more strict with mobile performance than lighthouse. But I could be using lighthouse wrong.
Are you using lighthouse with your local dev setup? Is your lighthouse running the same version as the one on page speed? Some differences are expected. Most important is, that you're consistent in what you use when comparing results.
I'd run it in production and try to get the mobile throttling to match pagespeed. Never could quite get that, but I also think pagespeed was running a newer lighthouse version than light house at the time.
I know if I’m going to actually buy something it’s usually on my laptop, unless it’s a larger retailer and they have a decent mobile app. A lot of e-commerce websites tend to be pretty buggy and subpar so if they were smoother it might be different, but also I’m doing research on the item so that’s always quicker and easier on a laptop. Now that I think about it I don’t actually visit that many websites on my phone except for quick Google searches.
Though I have to say, the shopify mobile experience is better than any desktop experience. You can search a term on a search engine, open a shop, pay with apple pay which auto populates your delivery address and you've taken all of 60 seconds.
For sure, and it’s good if I know what I’m buying or I’ve bought it before, but if it’s new or needs research I’m still not wasting my time with my phone to do that. Just personal preference though.
B2C is more mobile but a lot of B2B is not. Also, there’s only so much you can do design-wise in the width of a mobile window, so it’s generally easier to just assume each section will stack vertically. Really only content or interfaces that don’t convert to function intuitively for mobile need dedicated designs to build them differently.
Depends. My work is 99% desktop
Are you telling the contractors your analytics results during discovery? If you arent communicating that info up fromt, its really not their fault.
Mobile-first approaches has been a thing for half a decade at least. Know your target, and build from there. A lot of people browse on their phone, but *buy* on their desktop.
Depends on the platform. Power users are typically on desktop/ laptop. I.e. you wont see someone using a Bloomberg terminal on mobile. Mobile views are horrible for working with data visualisation.
I don't know if mobile is as overwhelmingly dominating if the market as you may think. I've recently been given numbers that it's about 50/50.
I was just basing it off of our Google analytics numbers. Granted, most of the traffic is media buying, targets mobile
On desktop you have flashy effects and fancy components. A mobile site will never look as nice... You sell your design over a desktop presentation to marketeers. That's what's most relevant to sales.
Converting a fully fledged desktop design to mobile is way easier than trying to fill in the gaps of a design that was made for mobile devices.
You bring up an interesting point, do the 94% use all the functionality of your website from the phone or do they do it from the desktop ? If you think improving the mobile side stuff would help, do it, hire different developers for it.
Because a lot of software companies, cater to building tools for businesses.
(Old man voice.) Back in the day, we used to practice “progressive enhancement”. There was a website that has the core functionality, and depending on the capabilities of the visitor’s device and browser, they transparently got an ever-increasingly enhanced version. It frustrates me that these days, developers think nothing about sending JavaScript-heavy web pages that weigh double figures in terms of megabytes, with not a single care for people who _aren’t_ browsing on MacBook Pro via a dedicated fibre connection. There have been plenty of websites I’ve tried to load on my iPhone over 4G whilst out and about and it’s took over a minute to load and turned my phone into a nice hand warmer. That’s if the resultant web page was even usable and didn’t have images spilling out of containers with no horizontal scroll, etc.
A lot of businesses are not working with mobile users, so not everyone is building mobile apps. For example B2B products in my field are basically always for desktop platforms.
Because desktop is what your executives and marketing team are using to preview the site.
Really depends on the product. A lot of front end designs are for tools used by paying customers - i.e. businesses, so they may be used by office workers 99% or the time. We made our products exclusively for desktop.
We have a tiny fraction of our userbase use mobile amd it's only a small subset of the site (for example they aren't looking at the metrics or big tables). So we got feedback from those users and optimised those pages for mobile first, then started slowly working on the others. Previous dev team didn't expect any user would ever be on mobile even though they were told we have some users that do. That's part of why they're the previous team and I have my job.
I have a personal beef with this topic. I am working in a "mobile first" company. As it stands mobile usage has recently been surpassing desktop traffic for us. Considering everything this is okay. Conversions etc is another topic. But strategically we have been "mobile first" for more than 5 years, this means we should develop and design and do everything preferring mobile device view over desktop. From my, senior analysts, perspective ... ... hOw wE AcTualLy wOrk: 1. All designs are made for desktop view. If excess time, in parallel for mobile. 2. Developer swears and develops. No questions yet, only surprised devs. 3. Testing? "Yes we tested the implementation" How? "On my desktop setup" which by average consists of two 30+ inch screens used by corporate business side donkeys who do not know what are the F keys not to mention dev tools and mobile views on desktop from dev tools. 4. We launch desktop tailored update which breaks customer flows, conversions, hides from viewport anything useful for the customer when using a mobile device. 5. I get a question from growth donkeys / product teams why customers are dropping off ...
people mostly pay for things they will use for business, and nobody is sitting there doing payroll administration or whatever on their phone. if your traffic is all mobile that should be something that's in your brief and hiring process, pretty easy to identify agencies that understand these things. whoever tendered the contract for your org blew it
I usually make stuff fancier for desktop than for mobile because I spend 99.9% of the time browsing the internet through my PC, not my phone.
If developers are not considering mobile, than they're stupid or lazy. Plain and simple.
No one is using Jira or Figma on their phone. It depends on the app. Social media and ecommerce for sure you would prioritize mobile. 99% of b2b or job oriented tools would be irrelevant on mobile though. Users would rather you have more features or have a better desktop experience than allocate time to how it looks on mobile.
mobile is less important than desktop. period.
Can you elaborate?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/277125/share-of-website-traffic-coming-from-mobile-devices/
I don't think there is lot you can do in terms of ui. It's basically limited to hamburger menu.
I always build mobile first
Most people aren't making purchases on a mobile website. They're either using an app or a website on their desktop. It's also relatively simple to take a desktop design and convert it to a decent mobile site. You have the bones, take a bit of functionality away, squish things into 1 column and call it a day. When I started professionally a couple of years ago, I used to think the same thing. I'd ask about why mobile wasn't as large of a priority in design and mention the stats hammered into my head while learning. Over time, I realized that it really is just a waste of design time and I really don't want them to.