What is a mobile-friendly website? It’s a website that’s designed to create an easy browsing experience on mobile phones. No pinching and zooming required.
There have been several pushes for clubs and associations to adopt mobile-friendly websites. But in 2018 Google slammed the gavel down. Mobile-friendly websites are now required for your club or association to receive meaningful traffic from search engines.
In this blog, we’ll cover:
- Gaining new members with a mobile-friendly site and mobile-friendly registration
- Why mobile first impressions matter
- Helping your current members with a mobile-friendly site
- Registration errors thanks to non-mobile-friendly designs
- Losing members because of bad user experience on mobile
- No mobile? No rankings
- What happens to sites that aren’t mobile-friendly
- Future proofing your website
- Mobile-friendly registration
Why the switch to mobile?
Your club needs a mobile-friendly website and a mobile-friendly online member registration process.
Why? Because the majority of world-wide traffic now comes from mobile devices.
According to Statista, mobile traffic in 2018 makes up 52.2% of all device traffic, world-wide. Zeroing in on North America, a 2017 study by BrightEdge suggests that in the US market, mobile accounts for 57% of all traffic. And some suggest it’s as high as 63%.
What does this mean for my business?
It means if you want to grow your club membership and keep your current members happy, you have to adopt a mobile-friendly site. Ideally, this includes an intuitive mobile-friendly registration process.
Gaining new members with a mobile-friendly site and mobile-friendly registration
We work with hundreds of clubs and associations and they all want to put their best foot forward, just like you. If your site isn’t mobile friendly, you’re not a bad organization and you’re not alone. But tailoring your online experience for mobile is now long overdue.
Mobile-friendly sites arrived shortly after the first iPhone was introduced by Apple in June, 2007. If your club or association doesn’t have a mobile-friendly site by now, you’re telling prospective customers that you’re behind the times.
Further more, if your club registration is not mobile-friendly, you could be missing out on sales and membership growth. A recent study by Google found that over 40% of all online transactions are now completed on a mobile device.
Mobile first impressions matter
If your old desktop site is the first thing a prospective member sees on their mobile phone, they’re going to associate a difficult user experience with your club. That’s not a good first impression.
Dating back to the early days of mobile, in 2013 SuperMonitoring found that 57% of users say they won’t recommend a business with a poorly-designed mobile site.
In contrast Google recently found that, 89% of people say they are likely to recommend a brand after a positive experience on mobile.
This clearly shows that people are not only appreciative of mobile-friendly sites, but they are also willing to advocate for your club or association if you have a good one.
Help your current members with a mobile friendly site
Having an easy-to-use mobile site and mobile registration process doesn’t just increase your chances of gaining prospective members. It also helps retain existing club and association members.
Google explains that “when people have a negative brand experience on mobile, they are 62% less likely to purchase from that brand in the future than if they have a positive experience.” This suggests that some of your current members are less likely to register for your club or association again if they’ve had a bad experience on mobile.
Who can blame them?
When people visit a non-mobile-friendly site on their mobile phone, tapping the right link can be difficult.
Of course, pinching and zooming helps to alleviate some of the pain by enlarging areas of your desktop site on mobile. However, the act of pinching and zooming itself can accidentally register a link click and send you to another area of a site.
This is annoying for prospective members and potentially costly for your club.
Registration errors thanks to non-mobile-friendly designs
If you have a non-mobile-friendly website that also accepts registrations, annoying accidental clicks can cost your club time and money.
When users accidentally click the wrong link on a news site, they can always go back and make another attempt at clicking the link they wanted. However, if a parent is attempting to register their child for say, an intermediate figures skating class and they accidentally register them for an advanced figure skating class, that’s a problem.
That parent will be frustrated with your club’s registration when they discover their mistake. This obviously negatively impacts that customer’s experience, but it also costs your club time.
For each registration mistake made, your club administrator (maybe you) will have to manually adjust registrations after the fact. This is fine if you have under-worked staff looking for something to do, but otherwise it’s a clear drain on resources.
Losing members because of bad user experience on mobile
Listen, we’re not saying happy club members are going to leave just because your website and registration process are not mobile friendly. That’s silly. But, what about those members that are on the fence?
Do you have members that haven’t been gelling with a coach? Or members who could just as easily drive to a different club across town? Those members are looking for reasons to stay with your club, and a frustrating user experience isn’t one of them.
No mobile friendly site? No ranking
If all the statistics in this blog have you worried that prospective buyers are going to think poorly of your non-mobile-friendly site, there is a bit of an ironic silver lining. People are much less likely to find your non-mobile-friendly site in Google’s search results today.
As of 2018, Google began it’s mobile-first indexing initiative. You may have first heard of this initiative when it was announced in 2015. The intention is to prioritize high-quality content on mobile-friendly sites. The reason behind this effort, is to meet the increasing demand of mobile searches.
This means that the mobile version of your site is now the main site Google reviews. So, when Google tries to determine whether it should show your business on a search results page, it now analyzes how your mobile site may help the searcher.
From 2018 forward you must prioritize your mobile site if you want to improve your chances of showing up on Google.
What happens to sites that aren’t mobile friendly?
Many non-mobile-friendly sites are being pushed off the first page of Google’s search results.
These effects were noticed shortly after Google first announced their intention to switch to mobile-first indexing in 2015. After Google’s announcement, Search Engine Land discovered that non-mobile-friendly sites were disappearing from the first page of Google.
Clubs with few local competitors are less likely to be pushed off the first page. This is because there are less businesses competing in their local search results. However, for those in populated areas with multiple competitors, this change is likely to decrease traffic to your site.
Future-proofing your website with Uplifter club software and Uplifter website builder
If you’re reading this article, you likely know how painfully fast technology can change. You might be saying, “Didn’t I just pay someone to redesign my site a few years ago? How can it be out of date again!?”
We get it.
We’ve had numerous gymnastics club websites, skating club websites, and even association websites that were badly in need of redevelopment. Club owners, coaches and administrators are busy creating enriching experiences for their members. It’s nearly impossible to run your club and make time to stay on top of technology trends.
That’s why Uplifter allows schools, clubs and associations to build their website directly on the Uplifter platform using one of our website templates. These templates handle major updates for you (like mobile-friendly design).
Of course, we still recommend that you follow the specifics for SEO best practice when you create content for your site. However, with Uplifter you don’t have to worry about site structure. So, the next time Google makes a major algorithm change, you won’t have to chase down your old contract developer. Instead, you can sit-back and let us do the heavy-lifting.
Mobile-friendly registration with Uplifter
When you build your site using the Uplifter website builder, you can guarantee that your website will seamlessly integrate with Uplifter’s mobile membership registration software. This means your club, school or association can make it easy for perspective members to register for classes and pay online using their mobile devices.
With Uplifter’s club software you can also track student skill development on your mobile or tablet devices. This means coaches can evaluate athletes in real-time whether they’re on the ice, at the pool, or in the studio.
Better yet, parents can check in on their child’s achievements on the go. By accessing their family profile, parents can stay engaged and easily see their child’s digital reports and weekly calendar.
Want to see how your club can get a mobile website and leverage mobile registration with Uplifter?
