MBA1874 Is Your Business Website Mobile First?

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Hey oh. Welcome to the $100 MBA Show. Business tips and strategies. You can't afford to miss every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my partner back in 2014. And in today's lesson you will learn Is your business website mobile first? Over 54% of all web traffic is now mobile. There's over 5.2 billion smartphone users in the world. This means that the likelihood of somebody seeing your website on a mobile device is incredibly high. You need to make sure your business's website is mobile first. What does this mean? Well, when web designers develop websites, there's a design term called mobile first and this means that they actually design the site to look great on mobile first before it looks great on desktop. This ensures that when anybody hits your business's website on a mobile device, it looks brilliant, it performs fast and converts at a high rate. In today's lesson, we'll talk about why this is so important, how to start moving towards this so your business website is mobile first and is super mobile friendly. And why being mobile first or being mobile optimized is not the same thing as having a responsive website. We'll get into all the details and hook you up with the information you need. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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Try it@8sleep.com your business website is so, so important to your business's success. It needs to perform properly on all devices, but especially mob. It's the gateway to your profits. Even if you're a consultant or a coach, where the purchase is done off the site, like through an invoice, they're going to make their decision to buy based on what they see on your website. And if they get frustrated, if they feel like I can't find what I'm looking for, or the page is laggy, or things are moving slowly, or God forbid images are broken or things are crooked or looking weird, or they can't scroll, they're going to be out of your website in a quick second. You can't afford this, okay? You spend so much time on bringing people to your website, on marketing, on SEO, on content marketing. You need to capture that moment. So you need to make sure it is brilliant on all devices. But today we're going to focus on mobile devices because it's the majority of all traffic. Some people don't recognize the fact that, that for a lot of people, their mobile device, their smartphone, is their primary device. Now, you and I, as entrepreneurs, you might think, no, my laptop, my computer that I work off is my primary device, is the one I use the most, is where I get things done. Many consumers, many of our customers don't work that way, don't live that way. Their life is totally through their mobile phone. They make appointments, they look up businesses, they make decisions, they buy on mobile. There's a reason why mobile device manufacturers like Apple and Samsung have made their screens bigger and bigger over the years. Because they started to realize people like using their phones over any other device. This is why having a mobile first approach, making sure your site looks brilliant first on mobile, meaning that when you design your site, ideally when you design your website, you should say, let's see what it looks like on mobile first. And then after designing it for mobile, then you say, okay, what is it going to look like on laptop, desktop, tablet, on all other resolutions. Why? Because the experience on a mobile device will be different. Okay? The way we scroll through menus, the way we drop down menus, the way we scroll through images or interact with the website, fill out forms, checkout, things like that need to look brilliant on mobile. So how do you do this? Well, the easy answer is you get a custom built website from, from a designer who knows what they're doing and has a great track record and they can show you examples of great live sites on mobile. Now if you don't want to go that route and you want to DIY yourself, I highly recommend you use some flexible tools that allow you to manipulate the way your site will look on mobile, on desktop, on tablet. Some of these tools work off a system like WordPress so you can buy a plugin like Elementor. I know they have a pro Elementor and it's definitely worth it. And Elementor, for example, will allow you to switch and design any page from mobile to desktop to tablet. And you can really take a look at what it's going to look like on every device and you can actually change the way things look. Because sometimes on mobile you don't have much real estate. So you're like, you know what, I don't need all that stuff. I can remove the video, I can replace it with an image, but when it's on desktop and I have real estate, I'll pop in that information. You might have to make some sacrifices for usability, and that's okay. Another great plugin for WordPress is Thrive Themes or Think. I believe it's called Thrive Builder because it's a plugin now. So a Thrive builder. These are the two I recommend if you're using WordPress now, if you're using a different tool like Squarespace or Weebly or one of those hosted website builder solutions, they have responsive design, meaning you'll design the site once, usually via a desktop, and then they will try to make it look great in all forms. This is not foolproof. Sometimes it doesn't exactly do a great job. And if they don't and you're using something like a squarespace, you need to contact support and you're going to say, hey, this page in this area, it just doesn't look right. Can you fix it on mobile only so they don't change the way it looks on other devices. You gotta work with the support and you gotta make sure it looks great. Anytime you publish a new page or a new blog post, take a look at what it's gonna look like on mobile. Look at it, preview it. There's usually a preview feature on the builder. This goes for WordPress as well. And then after you publish it, take a look at what it looks like on your phone. Make it a habit. Any new page, any New blog post. Take a look at what it looks like on your phone now when you're in those mobile edit modes in on your website, when you're editing it to make it look good on mobile. Remember, you're going to have to make some sacrifices sometimes to what's on the site, what's on the page, to make it look clean and to make it simple for the user. If you're ever in doubt, if you're ever wondering, hey, how do I do this? What kind of sacrifices should I make? Always reach out to best practices. What I mean by that. Go to sites that you frequent, blogs you love, businesses you endorse or you use. Go to their site on your mobile device and look at the difference between the mobile version versus the actual desktop version. You'll notice some pages will be different on mobile versus desktop. Look at the changes. Look at the trade offs they made. Often they basically will prefer text to communicate over multimedia, whether it's an image or a slider or even a video. Or maybe they'll change the way they present a video. So instead of just putting the video flat right there on the page and make it hard because you have to scroll or find it, they might prompt you with a play button somewhere. So you click it and it opens up in a modal or in a pop up. So if you're ever in doubt, look at the sites that you like as examples. Next, page speed. You need to make sure your site is moving fast. Google has a page speed tool. So you can just Google, literally Google Page speed tool. And you can see how fast your page loads on your website for all devices. You need to make sure your page is lightning fast because if it takes time to load, they might bounce. One of the things that Google's page speed tool will tell you is what's making your site slow. And often it's uncompressed images. You need to make sure that when you're uploading images to your site that you're using, don't use the largest size, use only the size that you need and you can compress and keep the quality. There's a lot of tools out there that allow you to do that. You can search on Google and find those tools where you can have a five megabyte image that gets compressed, still looks great, but the same image, same dimensions, is now 30 kilobytes. This makes it faster because every time somebody goes to your page, it's not loading a whole bunch of heavy files. Also, when it comes to page speed, be careful of all the little tools and apps you add to your page. Whether it's tracking pixels or integrated chat like Intercom or pop up software or any other plugins or tools that will have to load every time your site loads. Only use what you need. Try to be as minimal as possible.

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To wrap up today's lesson, Apple is going to be releasing its new iPhone in a few weeks. Every September they release a new iPhone and I encourage you to watch their keynote when it comes to their phone. Why? Because this is the device that many people that are going to be visiting your website are going to be using. Many people upgrade to the newest iPhone and it tells you where things are going. For example, you might learn that they're really betting their money on 5G. They believe 5G is going to be more important than wifi speeds or your wifi connection on your phone because 5G is soon to be faster. Yes faster than most wifi connections or fiber optic connections that a home or a cafe will have. Ask yourself the question why are they doing this? Where is the market going? Because this is a multi billion dollar soon to be trillion dollar business that invests a lot of money to know where is the future heading and this is going to give you an indication of how you should be planning your next site update. Will Apple be blocking certain things tracking? For example a few updates ago, a few years ago they blocked autoplay on video. So if you have autoplay on video on your website that's going to get blocked on Apple devices. So you need to make sure that there's a play button and does it just start playing. So take a look because they're going to give you some clues on how to improve your site. For all these Apple users in the future you need to focus on making sure your business website is brilliant on mobile. Most of your customers are going to check you out at least the first time on mobile. If they get a good impression, they'll share that site with other people. They'll go and visit you on their mobile or on their desktop. They're really relationship will continue. But if it's not nice, if it's an unpleasant experience on their mobile device, they will forget you forever. So you only have one chance to make a first impression. Make sure it looks and performs well on mobile. Thanks so much for listening to the 100 RVA show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe so you never miss an episode. Tune in tomorrow where it's Q and A Wednesday. One of our listeners writes in and asks this question, hey Omar, who has been your biggest mentor in business? We get into that in tomorrow's lesson. Can't wait for that. Before I go, I want to leave you with this quick tip. A lot of people split test their pages and forget to see how they look the different versions on mobile device. If you're going to split test and you're going to forget about mobile, don't apply the split test to mobile visitors. But if you are, make sure both versions of your page look brilliant and work brilliantly on mobile devices. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.