Why Mobile Rules: What My Website Stats Reveal About Modern Browsing Habits

When I checked my website stats, 64% of visitors were browsing on a mobile device. Desktop computers accounted for 35%, while just 1% accessed the site using a tablet.

That’s quite a split.

The dominance of mobile browsing comes as no great surprise. People check websites while commuting, sitting in waiting rooms, having coffee, relaxing on the couch or lying in bed when they probably should be sleeping. The phone is already in their hand. The computer might be in another room.

For someone like me who has maintained a website for many years, those numbers changed the way I thought about formatting a page.

A desktop screen gives a writer acres of room. A phone gives us a narrow strip of real estate and asks us to make the most of it.

Text has to be readable without pinching and zooming. Links and buttons need enough space around them to accommodate a fingertip rather than a mouse pointer. Huge blocks of uninterrupted text that look perfectly reasonable on a monitor can become intimidating slabs of words on a phone.

As an author, that last one matters to me.

My website is primarily about words. I write novels, short stories, articles and observations. Photography plays a part, but I’m not running an image gallery with a bit of text attached. The text is the content, so my mobile formatting has to make reading comfortable.

That means reasonably short paragraphs, plenty of breathing room and useful headings when a longer article needs breaking up. I don’t want readers confronted by a wall of words the moment a page opens.

There’s another good reason to think this way. Google uses the mobile version of a site’s content for indexing. Mobile isn’t some cut-down companion to the “real” website anymore. For search purposes, it’s effectively the main one.

Images need some thought too.

I’ve settled on a fairly simple rule for mine: one image at a time and 100% of the available screen width.

I don’t particularly like tiled images or galleries in the middle of an article. They can look wonderful on a desktop monitor, where three or four photographs have room to spread out. Squeeze that same arrangement onto a phone, and those photographs become thumbnails. Whatever detail made them worth including in the first place is suddenly difficult to see.

Slideshows don’t excite me much either.

Tap. Wait. Swipe. Tap again. Accidentally swipe the page instead of the photograph. Go backwards. Give up.

Perhaps I’m becoming impatient.

If I had a collection of photographs that genuinely required a gallery or slideshow, I’d rather take the reader to a separate page designed specifically for them. Give the photographs room, reduce the competing text and let that page do one job well.

Within an ordinary blog post, I prefer a single large image followed by text. Then another image later if the story requires one. It produces a simple vertical flow that suits the way we already use phones: scroll, read, scroll, look, read some more.

Image size also matters in another sense. A photograph may be displayed at the full width of a phone screen, but that doesn’t mean I need to upload a gigantic file straight from a camera. Oversized images add weight to a page and make mobile visitors wait unnecessarily, particularly when they’re away from fast Wi-Fi. The trick is maintaining enough quality for the photograph to look good without making someone download far more data than they can actually see.

Navigation needs the same kind of restraint.

I’ve come to appreciate simple menus, obvious links and pages that don’t continually throw things in front of the reader. On a desktop, a sidebar, popup or floating box occupies some spare territory. On a phone, it can obscure half the article.

That’s not helpful when the reason someone arrived was to read it.

Internal links also need room. If two or three linked phrases are packed tightly together, a mouse can pick the correct one easily enough. A thumb isn’t nearly so precise. Spacing becomes part of usability.

Then there’s the curious 1%: tablet users.

Tablets occupy a strange middle ground. They’re portable, but not quite as convenient as phones. They’re spacious, but don’t quite provide the traditional desktop experience either. They certainly still have their users — including people who simply appreciate the larger text and display — but my statistics suggest they’re a very small part of my particular audience.

Could that change? Of course.

Technology changes, screens change, and browsing habits change with them. That’s why I prefer to watch what visitors actually do rather than design a site around what I think they should be doing.

For now, though, my numbers make one thing abundantly clear.

When I publish a post, I may write and edit it on a large computer monitor, but that’s probably not where most people will read it.

So I have to think small screen first.

And for a novelist, perhaps that’s the most important point of all: remove whatever gets between the reader and the words.

–Michael (Dark Fiction. Author of SEETHINGS (the first book), free for a limited time)