How to Get Your Website Mobile Friendly Under an Hour and For Very Little Cost

With Google announcing their new algorithm, heavily weighted around Mobile friendliness, many small businesses are stressed.  What if you don’t have the time or money right now to re-do your website? Or worse, what if you don’t even know whether your site is mobile friendly or not?  

This discussion came up yesterday with a peer of mine who has a highly ranked site with thousands and thousands of visitors per month. He knows his site isn’t mobile friendly but to re-do the site will affect his ranking, in the short term anyway. Here is some advice I gave him.  Hopefully it helps many other small businesses breathe easier as well.

1.   TEST YOUR SITE

If you have built your website in the last few years, chances are your savvy web developer was smart enough to build it in what is often referred to as a responsive website design.  Not only is it important to have a mobile friendly version of your site to maintain or increase your company’s rankings in Google, but it will also increase engagement with your site.  These days, it’s not unlikely that your prospect has a computer, tablet and a smart phone.  Each of these has a different screen size.  A responsive or mobile friendly site will render your site differently depending on these screen sizes.  If I can read your site on my phone, I’m more likely to stay on it and learn more about what you have to offer.  If I can’t I will give up and move on to the next.

So the first thing I recommend is to test your site here

2.   GET A QUICK & COST EFFECTIVE MOBILE VERSION OF YOUR SITE

You might be surprised to know that you can make your site mobile in less than hour.  That’s right.  There are tools out there that will create a mobile version of your site.  It’s important to note that these applications actually create a second site and don’t convert your site into a responsive site.  But Google doesn’t care whether you have a mobile site and a non-mobile site vs one responsive site.  It simply cares that you have mobile friendly experience for your users.   This means that this quick fix will save your rankings in the short term.

You do need to be careful though that you don’t split your rankings between the 2 sites so you when choosing an application you want to make sure that it gives credence to the main website.  One such application that I have used for myself and recommended to clients in Dudamobile.  If you click here you will see you can actually set up a mobile friendly site in less than an hour for FREE.  I don’t recommend the free version because of the ads, so would recommend the paid version for a whopping $10/month.

Simply click Go Mobile, enter your URL, make some slight modifications to get it to look to your liking and then plug it in to your site. 

Click here to see what types of platforms they can’t typically convert.

I’m sure there are other applications like Dudamobile, so Google away to make sure you get the best option for you.  While these type of applications may not convert certain aspects, they do allow you to make a quick fix for now until you have the time or money to create a better version.

3.   WORDPRESS USERS – GET A QUICK RESPONSIVE VERSION OF YOUR SITE

Jetpack has an application within it to change your entire site to a responsive site.  If you are WordPress user, click on Jetpack in your dashboard, locate the Mobile Theme and click Configure.  While this might require a little more tweaking or a couple of hours of webmaster time, this is another great quick fix.  You can get some great how to directions here if you want to try it yourself.

We have used it for a couple of clients now and it is working quite well.

4.  START PLANNING FOR A LONG TERM SOLUTION

While the solutions above are great to alleviate your current situation, at some point you will want to plan a new responsive website for your company.    The key here is to make this change when you have the time and money to focus on it.

As I was explaining to a client a couple of days ago, websites now are more than just an online brochure.  They are the hub of your online marketing system.  To maximize your investment, you want to take the time to focus on bringing in the right talent to create it, so that your visitors can easily get to the information they need to make a sale.  This means:

• It needs to be responsive
• It needs to be optimized properly to rank (this is much more than just keywords on a page)
• It needs to have ample ways for a visitor to engage with the site
• It needs to have ample calls to action
• It needs to stand out from your competitors and truly represent you and your brand

Breathe easy knowing you have a quick fix for now and then take the time to create that new website right!

Source: Hubspot 2