Your customers expect a great browsing experience regardless of what device they use.  How your company’s website appears and its ease of use on all of these devices can have a big impact on your bottom line.

Years ago, you could put up a website optimized for a screen resolution of 1024 x 768, test it no a few browsers and operating systems, and be confident visitors to your website would all have a somewhat similar user experience.  Some users may have had higher screen resolutions and slight variations due to different browsers or viewing on a Mac instead of a PC.  For the most part, however, the website appeared consistently across everyone’s computers.

Today, people visit websites using many different devices.  They use smart phones, tablets, TVs, and PCs interchangeably as they engage with companies and move through their buying process for different products and services.

Consider these Device Statistics…

• 56% of American adults have a smartphone (Pew Research Center)
• 28% of cell owners own an Android; 25% own an iPhone; 4% own a Blackberry (Pew Research Center)
• 34% of American adults own a tablet computer (Pew Research Center)
• 34% of cell internet users go online mostly using their phones, and not using some other device such as a desktop or laptop computer. (Pew Research Center)
• Average smartphone usage grew 81 percent in 2012 (Cisco)
• Tablet shipments will surpass PC shipments in the 4th quarter of 2013 (IDC)
• 90% of people move between devices to accomplish a goal (Google)

Businesses that provide a seamless experience to their site’s visitors across all devices are able to generate more engagement and sales.

Four Ways to Ensure Your Website Works Well on Multiple Devices

1. Understand How Customers Currently Interact with Your Website

Analyze the traffic on your website to determine where your visitors are coming from, the devices they are using, and they types of content they are consuming on each device.  If your mobile audience is at or above 10%, it’s time to start optimizing for mobile.  Keeping the user’s goals front and center as you develop your content customization strategy is the key to crafting a seamless experience for your site’s visitors.

2. Utilize Responsive Web Design

Responsive web design (RWD) ensures your website’s content displays correctly and uniformly on a variety of devices, platforms, and screen sizes – without creating multiple websites.  This is a great solution if you don’t need advanced features.  Special coding techniques are utilized that make a web page automatically adjust to the device or screen for the best user experience possible.  No more frustrating scrolling and zooming.

3. Develop a Dedicated Mobile Website

For websites that require a lot of user interaction and more mobile functionality, we recommend building a dedicated mobile website.  With this approach, the focus is placed on specific challenges such as navigation, the ability to complete forms easily, visibility, load time, and creating an overall seamless experience for mobile users.

If your site will be selling products online, filling in detailed forms, or interacting with other site visitors through a mobile device, then building a dedicated mobile version may be the best solution.

4. Measure, Analyze & Improve

Use your website’s analytics and stats to measure the interactions on your site from various devices and make improvements as needed on an ongoing basis.

Tip: To view your website instantly on various desktop, tablet, and mobile devices, checkout BrowerStack.