Here at AJA Design we have been building responsive web sites for a while and have some data and comparisons we would like to share with you. Responsive is when a website can adapt/respond to different devices, for example if I go to this site on my smartphone it serves me with the same website and content as a desktop computer but tailored towards my phone’s size and internet capabilities.
There are a lot of facts and figures that get thrown about but let me explain using real data from our clients and compare a responsive web site to a non responsive website. Let’s say we have website A and website B. Both have roughly the same traffic and users. If we look at the mobile bounce rates for both websites you will see quite a difference. The bounce rate is when a user loads or partially loads a website and leaves straight away.
Website A (responsive) – 47.8% Bounce Rate
Website B (non responsive) – 80% Bounce Rate
That’s a loss of 33% on the non responsive website in one month. Our customers traffic in comparison to the majority of websites is very low because they are mostly in a niche market. That being said, just one key account manager or board member on a mobile could be worth millions.
If we look at the engagement statistics on both sites it gives us some interesting insights on how the users behave and interact with the content. The times are how long a user spends looking through the site on average.
Website A – 00:01:59
Website B – 00:00:54
When you compare these two figures, users stay on a site 50% longer. Just a note about the average times, although these seem low they are based on the average user that perhaps reads a couple of pages and calls a phone number for example. That said 54s is not enough to take in enough information to make a decision, or get in touch. The data is amazing on how much these aspects can affect your website and customers, and investing the money to go responsive seems like a no brainer.
Ok so let’s get the very first figure and apply it to traffic for the whole year to see how many customers website B has potentiality lost over the whole year.
We make it a loss of 4389 users (customers) and on top of that the mobile users that are not lost do not engage with the content in the same way. Our data indicates mobile users grow year on year as desktop users fall. I must mention these figures are only for mobile and the same data has been found for tablets so the potential loss could be double.
