I have a legacy e-commerce site heavily styled from the desktop era and have been making good money. They are based on a very sophisticated e-commerce software and it costs an arm and a leg to make the whole site responsive per present standards.
According to my GA analytics, I’m potentially letting go of thousands of dollars per month in sales with the majority of my site’s traffic being mobile yet converting at less than half of conversion rate of the desktop traffic.
I will make the site responsive when I have more time but for now what’s the single most important and easiest thing I can do to make the site more usable on mobile devices?
Considering iPhone Safari is pretty good at rendering desktop sites with regards to usability, I think responsive layout isn’t the priority here.
My idea is to enlarging the font sizes of all the texts and sizes of all buttons, by, say 50%, for all mobile devices.
Would this work and make the mobile experience better if not perfect? What could be the potential problem for this very biased and partial approach?
If this is true, I would say you cannot afford not to go responsive. Start doing it whenever you can.
The actual functioning of the site (processing of sales etc) does not need to change, just the layout, so it’s mainly just css, though you may need to modify a bit of html too.
I don’t think that will work. You can see how enlarging the fonts will look by zooming the fonts in Firefox. What happens is, like with most non-responsive sites, it breaks the layout because it is too rigid to accommodate any change. A fully responsive site will allow font zoom without breaking the layout. Some half-baked “responsive” sites will accommodate changes in width, but do not accommodate font zoom.
So to make larger fonts possible, you will need a fully responsive site in the first place. Doing this by half measures will not be a very productive use of your time and still not create a good UX for mobile users or help your mobile SERPs.
I would advise to do it properly, as soon as you find the time.
The problem with that approach as Sam mentioned abve is that the text will then be too big for the areas in which it sits and will either overlap or overflow depending on situation.
This is what your page looks like with the text increased for small-devices.
As you see the text in the menus overflow and elements are misplaced. By the time you correct all these issues you would have been better off fixing the layout properly. You really need a one column layout for small phones to make them accessible and usable.
It’s very hard to use a mobile site where you have to pinch and zoom to complete any task and users will just go elsewhere.
There really is no easy way around this. Maybe something like this may be of interest but its a paid service and I haven’t seen any reviews of it to comment.
Mobile won’t convert as well as desktop, because it’s hard to put the payment details in on mobile. It may be your customers just want to mainly browse on mobile. Putting some feedback tools on your website or doing some customer research may give a better indication of what changes if any need to be made.
That said, mobile is already very important, so responsive design is now accepted best practice.
If you’re making good money than why not invest in modernizing the website. The e-comm platform can’t be that great if the company doesn’t offer a modern upgrade that includes a experience optimized for mobile and tablet usage. Perhaps it is time to think about a change. How old is the website?
it’s about 4 - 5 years old. I’m kind of reluctant to make the site mobile.
My thoughts are:
I did the design myself and have been emotionally attached to it and reluctant to change. How to overcome this?
Desktop sites without modern responsiveness sort of convey more trust because it’s almost definitely an old site. It can even be considered vintage if the design’s done right. It seems more like a business that focuses on the products rather than one that’s focused on marketing.
Considering the complexity of the site, I’d say you did a genius job of designing and coding. The layout seems logical and efficient… user friendly.
I disagree. Outdated sites or very poorly re-coded sites do not convey a sense of trust to me at all. My initial response when I find such sites is guarded. That’s me.
Back to my daring “Then don’t”…
You are in possession of more logical reasons to update your site than reasons not to do so or to delay doing so indefinitely. And you can be assured that writing a mobile friendly version of your site will be a challenge that will not get easier as time passes. @PaulOB’s screen shot in post #3 would have been more dramatic had he been displaying the size charts. Talk about broken if the font size were increased (your question at that time). Can you imagine how to code those charts so they fit on the screen of a mobile device using accepted current coding practices? A challenge!
Consider this… there are a number of major companies who, for various reasons, have a desktop site and a separate mobile site. Maybe you would like to consider that path at least for starters. Begin writing a mobile only version of your site and see how it works out. You will have to exercise your imagination to come up with new ways of presenting information that flows with the same logical ease that your desktop site possesses. In the end, you might be able to code one site that covers the spectrum of smarthphone to desktop, but start with smartphone and work your way to larger devices. That would be the mobile-first approach. Stop and take a break when you run out of ideas or energy. In the meanwhile your destop site will still be earning money.
I disagree, to me a site like that would seem out-dated and not been shown any care and attention for some time, like the owner does not care about updates or improving UX. It may imply they take a similar disregard to updating other aspects of the site, such as security which is important to visitors in the context of on-line shopping.
Just because a site has a fresh new design, it does not imply it has only been around for the last 5 minutes. The domain could have been around for years.
The choice is ultimately yours.
You could leave the site working as is, but in the background you could be working on a new design.
Perhaps have a read about AMP which seems to be gaining ground. From what i can see it goes slightly against responsive web by going back to a separate version for mobile.
So rather than having to re-code your site to make it responsive you would create an AMP version which would be mobile specific. In theory you would have a competitive advantage at the moment as not everyone is doing it yet so your site could potentially load faster etc on mobile than the next site so you could move up the mobile rankings faster.
Re data on mobile conversion rates, I don’t have a link to hand, but I’m sure you’ll find info if you search. That said, the difficulty of paying on mobile is going to decrease, with companies set to develop mobile friendly checkouts (such as pay by touch on fingerprint scanner). What I am saying is you don’t know how much money you are losing at present, because people may be more browsing than buying on mobile. However, what is true is that mobile is the future, so going responsive with your site is something you will need to do. If money is not there in the short term, then consider using Twitter / Pinterest / Facebook more to get seen on mobile, as they are all mobile friendly.
Have you tried ecommerce sites on mobile? With the amount of typing on a pokey little picture of a keyboard that hides most of the page I’m on, box ticking, large blobs of text to read etc I don’t think I’ve ever completed a purchase using mobile.
I may do an initial product search on mobile but go to PC (or tablet is not quite as bad a smartphone) to read more and order.
You should head for a responsive site but short term have some stripped down mobile-only content. The mobile-only can offer to open the full-fat desktop version but basically it’s to do the first steps of the marketing job: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDA_(marketing) where the final “Action” is “call us” or “go to the full-fat website”.
“Responsive” is interpreted differently by different people. For example, some will display the entire “normal” content by taking a 3 column page and rendering it as a single column 3 times the height, better (IMHO) is when the central column contains the key content, right and left cols are non-essential supporting info and they are not rendered at all on mobile. OK that’s a simplistic example but essentially address the mobile audience in a way best suited to their chosen platform. That probably means simpler, less content.
“…emotionally attached to it …” Don’t be, a 5 year old site has earned it’s keep, you have to move on sometime and in 5 years a lot has changed, take the challenge and implement some exciting new stuff before a competitor beats you to it.
