Editing and Optimizing For Mobile (Not Desktop) is Priority For Websites

When building a website, most website creation services will default to desktop editor, and require that you add elements and everything else to your website using that desktop view but what you really need to focus on is your mobile website.

The majority of people use their phone to surf the internet and of course, access social media apps. If you're running ads on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest, it's very likely that the users will click your ads and arrive on your website using their mobile device-- 96% of users who saw my Pinterest ads in the last week were on a mobile device.

The problem is, website building services like Wix default to what users will see when they arrive on the website on their desktop, instead of the device that the majority of users are active on today, which is mobile.

When building your website, there's so much to think about that it's easy to forget to click over to the mobile editor view and see how your new elements and content appear from the mobile experience. But it's absolutely vital to your business to make sure that your mobile site has all of the content and functionality that you intend it to have.

Unfortunately, content often gets disfigured on mobile, as you're building it through desktop. Text won't format properly, elements that you have set at the top of the page on your desktop editor will end up at the bottom of your mobile page, seemingly for no reason. For example, for this Blissboarder Publishing blog that you're reading, I added a summary description of what readers can expect to learn from my blog posts, and placed it at the top of the blog page on desktop. Today when I logged in and clicked over to the mobile editor view, I saw that this description text was appearing at the very bottom of the blog page, buried under all of my blog posts. Ugh.

On desktop, I created six beautiful resource pages to promote our recently published book, and created Pinterest campaigns driving traffic to those pages. The pages looked great, the Pinterest ads I created were branded and relevant, everything looked good to go. But then when I clicked into the mobile view of the resource pages, I saw that all my valuable text had somehow been hidden from the page! Users were clicking on the ads, arriving on the resource pages, and seeing nothing. Double ugh.

I went back into the Wix mobile editor and unhid these elements. Then, of course, I went to the pages on my mobile phone to double check that they were actually showing this time.

If you feel foolish for making this mistake, you should know that even professionals make this massive mistake. In a previous role that I held as a marketing coordinator, I worked with a website design company who built our e-commerce sites. Leading up to the much-anticipated launch of our first e-commerce website selling surfboards, everything was falling into place, and we went live.

A week after the launch, I checked website traffic and saw a huge bounce rate on mobile, showing that users who arrived on our website and quickly left on the first page. Desktop looked okay, but the majority of our traffic would be mobile users. I used my phone to log onto the website and saw that instead of surfboards, luxury handbags were showing for sale on our website! OMG. The professional, high-priced website building team we hired had forgotten about the mobile experience, and had allowed our website to go live without any of our products featured on mobile.

I quickly called the web team, alerting them of their mistake. I could nearly hear his heart drop on the other end of the line when I told him what I was seeing. We got off the call, and they immediately got to work to fix their massive mistake. It's worth mentioning that we were being billed for the mobile site design in addition to desktop, and they hadn't done the work.

The lesson to be learned is always prioritize the mobile user experience, even when the website building service and your web team will default to designing for desktop. It's a costly mistake that's easy to make with each website update, but one you don't want to suffer the consequences of.