Hello, fellow equestrians.

2021 Is upon us and we’ve all taken on a new chapter by now, so I thought it would be relevant to start addressing “need-to-have” functions for your equine business’ digital presence.

Now, you’ve probably heard the term “mobile-friendly” website or “responsive web design”, which covers whether a website works well on a mobile device or not.

But is it really THAT important that your equine website is mobile friendly?

If we take a glance at the various types of websites, more than half of the visitors are usually acquired from a mobile phone or tablet. If your equine website is not designed to work properly across these devices, then the chance of your visitor getting a bad user experience is quite high. This in turn will reduce your conversion ( actions a visitor makes on your equine website), whether you are selling products through a webshop or just want the visitor to contact you.

If we take a closer look at the percentage of mobile device website traffic worldwide from 2015- 2020, you can easily see a clear increase:

In Scandinavia alone, about 30% of all websites don't work very well on mobile phones, which is guaranteed to reduce visitors to your equine website.

Why should your equine website design be mobile-friendly?

Well, as more and more people surf the internet through their smartphones and tablets, it goes without saying that it is a good idea for your equine business to have a fully adaptable website for visitors exploring your services.

Some of the typical errors we see on equine websites that are not mobile-friendly are things like:

• Text that is shown outside of the screen

• Text is sized too small

• Menu and navigation are useless

• Images that are only partially displayed

• Buttons and links are difficult to press

• Special features like sliders in galleries do not work

Should I mobile-optimize my equine website or invest in a new design?

If you have a fairly new equine website that you are generally satisfied with, and there are only minor errors on mobile devices, then it can often pay to simply adapt the existing web design so that it becomes more mobile-friendly.

However, in many cases, it is often the easiest (and cheapest) to replace the entire website with a new and optimized equine web design. This way you achieve an equine website that is not only mobile-friendly but also has a completely modern web design.

Audit Your Equine Website’s Page Speed

Another crucial point when examining whether your equine website design is mobile friendly is how fast the content is displayed. If your equine website has a page with large and heavy images that are not optimized properly this will make your website very slow to appear over a mobile connection.

People don’t have patience when it comes to the internet, which is why

securing your page speed across devices is generally important for the user friendlies of your equine website.

You’ve probably experienced the importance of page speed yourself once or twice,

Often when you are browsing a website via your mobile phone you don't have the same Internet speed as at home. This places a greater demand on the website in terms of loading time and how heavy content on a website is displayed.

This is also one of the things that make visitors quickly lose patience and leave the website again. So even if you have a mobile-friendly equine web design, you also need to make sure that the speed of your website is optimized for mobile devices.

If your equine website design is not mobile-friendly in terms of layout and speed, then you will most likely miss out on potential customers and clients. So, having a mobile-friendly website is extremely important for your equine business moving forward in 2021.

For more info read: Why Page Speed is Important for your Horse Business

How Googles’ Mobile-First Indexing will affect your equine website

Dear readers this is probably the most important part of this blog post, so please sharpen your eyes, or fetch your glasses, because this will have great importance for your equine business’ ability to rank in Google search results.

Google previously announced that from March 2021 desktop sites only will be completely dropped from Google’s indexing. When we write dropped, we mean gone, done, finito!

This means if your equine website design is not optimized for mobile, then you will simply fall out of Google’s rankings once this indexing change has been completed!

The date is firmly set to March 2021 and not only will desktops be dropped from the indexing, but any other images and assets your equine website may display that is in a desktop version on your site will also be dropped from Google’s new way to index.

Hence you need to ensure that the mobile version of your equine website business is accurately representing the content that you wish to rank for in Google.