Chances are, by now you’ve heard how important it is to have a mobile-friendly website. This is where your customers are at and it’s where you should be meeting them. But what makes for a positive mobile site experience? 

These are the few most important factors:

• Mobile-centric design
• Quick loading
• User-friendly

Where a great mobile site experience used to be a unique selling point (USP) for a contractor, now it’s a standard expectation in contractor web design! 

Desktop Use Is Outdated

Any customer new to iMarket will discover that we’ve begun to prioritize “mobile-first” design when it comes to building new websites. What does this mean? It means that we are designing your site for mobile users first and foremost. Your site will be designed and coded to work on smartphones and mobile devices first, then adapted to expand into a full desktop view for users on laptops or desktop computers. 

Why? Because desktop use is outdated! Simply put, the web has gone mobile. At the very minimum, 50% of web traffic is coming from mobile devices. For some of our clients in the HVAC, plumbing, and electrical spaces, that percentage is much higher. 

iMarket Solutions has always worked to make consistent and up-to-date improvements to our websites since our company’s founding. We make no exceptions when it comes to the development of mobile usability and underlying technology. 

Why Mobile First? 

Mobile-First is the new standard of website design. The goal of any home services or HVAC website is to deliver to the end user the information they need, in the easiest way possible, for whatever device they’re using. The iMarket approach to site design, load times, user experience, and site content are all optimized with mobile conversion in mind. 

Our research has found that mobile users want quick access to the information they’re looking for--they do not want to read a lot or scroll through a long page. Instead, they want a website to feel snappy and responsive as they browse and allow them to find the answers to the problems they have. 

Achieving Successful Mobile First Design

Just having a responsive site isn’t enough anymore. You need to have a site that is truly optimized for smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices, and there are a number of factors that contribute to the successful implementation of this:

Ultra-Fast Loading

Our mobile-first sites have been re-engineered to reduce the amount of information that needs to load to display a web page. Not only does this give us vastly improved scores in Google PageSpeed Insights tests, it also gives your customers a lighting-fast experience when using the website.

Content Is Essential

Google has been working on mobile first indexing for a while due to the heavy shift in the way that web users search and browse for information. The adoption of mobile devices has become a way of life for the majority of Americans. 

In 2016, Google announced that: 

“Today, most people are searching on Google using a mobile device. However, our ranking systems still typically look at the desktop version of a page’s content to evaluate its relevance to the user. This can cause issues when the mobile page has less content than the desktop page because our algorithms are not evaluating the actual page that is seen by a mobile searcher.”

As of March 2021, Google switched all websites from desktop-first to mobile-first indexing. So what does this mean for content?

It means that the content has had to adapt. While the same content needs to be on both your desktop site and mobile site, the way that it is formatted needs to be strategic--presented in a way that won’t distract users from the overall goal of the website or webpage. The iMarket strategy ensures this is the case by limiting scroll-distances in site content and including “read more” links that allow the user more control over how much content they have to digest at once. 

Make It Responsive

Responsive web design is an approach that enables web pages to render correctly on a variety of devices, as well as any window or screen sizes--from minimum to maximum display size. 

A website that loads pages quickly receives better rankings on search engines, particularly Google. A responsively designed website provides a positive user experience--resulting in higher search rankings for your contracting business! 

Consider the Form Factor

The overall experience of a well-designed mobile webpage will feel more like an app than it will scrolling a website. The most notable difference is the fixed footer with a designated call button--this speaks to the user experience and form factor by putting the most important buttons right within reach of the users’ thumb, reducing any extra work on their end. 

Keep Up With Google Updates 

Google’s Core Web Vitals metrics measure how long it takes your site to achieve three factors: loading, visual stability, and interactivity. In May of this year, Google made this a huge ranking factor in their continued endeavor of redefining the key “must have” components that will impact how they will rank your website in search results. 

At iMarket Solutions, we are already building our mobile first websites from the ground up, in order to meet and exceed Google’s expectations for Core Web Vitals. 

When you’re ready to see what iMarket Solutions can do with web design for contractors, give our number a call. iMarket Solutions: Dedicated to Contractor Success!