Is your website mobile-friendly? Try these 3 simple tests

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Is your website mobile-friendly? That’s a trickier question than it might seem at first, especially if you’ve had a redesign done that is supposed to have made your website mobile-friendly. Here are 3 simple tests to determine whether your website is or isn’t mobile friendly using a standard web analytics package.

First, be sure you’re able to segment out three classes of visitor: desktop, tablet, and smartphone. The way in which we use each device is different enough to matter.

Once you know that, look at the overall summary of your website’s content. Are things like bounce rates and exit rates within range of each other?

If one category is significantly higher than another, you may have a site that’s unfriendly to that particular category of device.

Next, look specifically at your returning visitors. Assuming your website and content are doing their jobs, returning visitors should be slowly on the increase. Look specifically at your returning visitors for mobile, though: are they increasing proportionally? If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, returning visitors on mobile devices may be on the decline instead:

Most important, use those same segments of audience by device to look at the money, your conversions. Here’s an example of a site with a serious mobile problem in their checkout process:

If your checkout or conversion process isn’t mobile-friendly (even if the rest of your site is), you have some work to do to improve things.

These three tests are by no means the be-all, end-all of mobile-friendly design, but they’re a good place to start asking questions about whether there’s a real problem or not.