If Your Nonprofit Website Isn’t Mobile-Friendly, You’re Shooting Yourself in the Foot

Sometimes change happens so seamlessly we barely notice it, if we notice it at all.

For example, one day while waiting for a friend, you pull out your smartphone to kill time. You visit a favorite news site and scroll through, clicking on articles of interest. Each page loads quickly. All of the text is easy to read and fits perfectly on the screen; images are so clear you can see fine details.

Because everything operated so smoothly, you didn’t realize you were browsing a mobile-optimized website. However, when a website isn’t mobile-friendly, people notice. If they get sufficiently annoyed, they might leave.

The future is mobile—the future is now

Getting your website mobile-friendly shouldn’t be viewed as an “elective procedure” that can be dealt with sometime in the future. You need to take care of it now.

Perhaps you don’t browse the Internet much on your smartphone, but a lot of people do—and this isn’t a trend waiting to go out of style. Consider these statistics:

• In 2015, 65% of U.S. adults owned smartphones, up from 35% in 2011.
• In 2015, 56% of all Internet traffic was from a mobile device.
• Cisco estimates that over 70% of Internet traffic will be from mobile devices by 2020.
• 64% of U.S. adults own a smartphone (Pew Research Center).
• 89% of smartphone users use it for browsing the Internet (Pew Research Center).
• 91% of mobile users say that access to content is very important (Wolfgang Jaegel).
• 83% of mobile users say that a seamless experience across all devices is very important (Wolfgang Jaegel).
• Google says 61% of users are unlikely to return to a mobile site they had trouble accessing (McKinsey & Company).

What we know

Ally 360 has a lot of experience getting our clients’ websites mobile-friendly. And we know that websites that aren’t mobile-friendly lose potential revenue. They’re also penalized by Google in search ranking results.

For example, visitors to a website that isn’t mobile-friendly will be twice as likely to “bounce,” or leave, the webpage they landed on. For a nonprofit, that means lost revenue. Specifically, by analyzing our clients’ websites, we’ve learned that 70% of visitors who made it to a checkout page bounced before completing a transaction. Moreover, the percentage of completed purchases typically dropped by two-thirds.

How it’s done

Despite some Google search results that claim you can “Get Your Website Mobile Friendly in 2 Minutes,” the truth is, it isn’t easy to do.

In theory, the concept of redirecting your website to a mobile device is straightforward: A person navigating a website on their mobile device is redirected to the version of the website designed to work in whatever mobile device is being used. There are different ways to accomplish this.

One way is for programmers to insert a special JavaScript code that directs the browser to a mobile-specific site.

Another way is to move your entire website to an open source content management system, such as WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal.

There are migration tools that will keep everything the same. With just a few programming fixes by hand—because the migrations are never 100% perfect—you can have a website that looks great on desktop and mobile, all without changing a thing.

Ally 360 has considerable experience getting websites mobile-friendly using a process we call Mobile Mirroring. After implementing our techniques, the mobile-friendly version of your website will mirror the look and feel of the original.

Let’s get mobile!

We hope you now understand why making your website mobile-friendly is so important for the overall mission of your nonprofit. We realize this is very technical stuff. Unless you have a skilled IT professional on staff, making your website mobile-friendly is a daunting task.

Tags: Ally 360, Digital Marketing, mobile, Non-profit, Social Media, web