Audit Your Website on a Mobile Device

More than 70 percent of Americans browse the internet on a mobile device. That’s a lot of potential traffic to your real estate website from a smartphone or tablet. While that number is encouraging, here’s what should really make you nervous: 61 percent won’t return to a mobile site that doesn’t look good or work well and 57 percent won’t recommend a business with a poorly designed mobile website. How do you overcome these numbers? It starts with a website audit on your mobile device.

Why The Mobile Experience Matters

With so many people using their smartphones to access the internet and search for information, what they find on the small screen is just as important as the search they do from their desktop or laptop browser. In real estate, you have too much competition to make it easy for visitors to want to click or tap away from your website. And if they can’t read or use your website on their phone, that’s exactly what they’ll do.

To generate leads and rank in search engines, you have to make sure the mobile users of your website can actually use your website. Some problems are more common than others. These are the things you should be on the lookout for:

• Hard to read content
• Having to “pinch” or squeeze the screen or expand it to see images and content
• Forms that can’t be filled out – which can kill your online lead generation

To make sure this isn’t happening on your website, the easiest thing to do is perform an audit of your website on a mobile device.

Audit Your Website On A Mobile Device

If the word “audit” conjures up images of spreadsheets, files, records, and reports, breathe easy. This one is a much simpler thing to do, and you don’t have to hire anyone to do it for you. Simply pick up your phone, open up your browser, and go to your own website. You can and should do this after any major or minor change to your website, whether design or functionality. Click on every page and look for formatting problems:

• Fonts that are too big and take up the entire screen
• Fonts that are too small to easily read
• Horizontal scrollbars – usually from images and tables that are too big and extend past the borders of your layout.
• Buttons that are hard to tap and use – calls to action, share buttons, etc.
• Anything that requires the pinch, squeeze, or expand motion in order to see it better
• Menus that can’t easily be read or accessed
• Search options that are hard to see or use
• Colors or elements that look different (and worse) from the desktop version

While your website won’t look identical to the desktop version (frankly, it shouldn’t look the exact same), users should be able to use it, navigate around it, and find the same options no matter what device they use. If they can’t, this is a definite problem.

What To Do Next

Fixing mobile issues on your website doesn’t have to be complicated. Just reach out to the iHOUSE Elite Service Team, point out any problems you find in your audit, and we’ll take care of it for you.