Desktop or Mobile?

Something I’ve had a few people ask me recently is..what view is more important to focus on while building a website? Desktop or Mobile? 🖥️📱

As a whole, mobile devices are used a bit more frequently in e-commerce shopping in comparison with desktop - and that is both from my research and personal experience. According to some sources, internet traffic on mobile actually passed desktop back in 2018!

However it is important to note that customers tend to shop differently on mobile and desktop, even if it is the same website. Even myself as an avid online shopper, I notice that I will behave differently when viewing a website from mobile vs desktop. On mobile, I don’t tend to browse as regardless of how good a website is, it can still be frustrating searching things on a smaller screen than it is on desktop. If I know what it is I want, it is a lot easier to shop on mobile since I always have mine with me, however if I want to do more research or browse a list of products, then I choose desktop. And from what I have learnt from different articles, other customers have a tendency to behave similarly.

Because of these differing behaviours, it is hard to confirm which device type will be used the most with your own website, but you can make a reasonably informed judgement based on your products and website info. If you know you will have customers buying the same product over and over again, then you can make a good guess that they will probably prefer using mobile. If customers need to spend some time choosing a product or selecting variants, or researching products, they are more likely going to use desktop as it provides a large screen, and encourages them to actually sit down and focus.

This is why it’s important to have a good balance between how mobile and desktop appears when designing a website. In Shopify, you can actually switch between mobile view and desktop view with a click of a button. When I build websites, I choose to build them with the desktop view on first, then as I finish parts of the site, such as the homepage or a product page, I will switch to mobile view and rearrange things depending on readability etc, which will always vary between devices because of screen size. I find this method keeps the integrity of the site design, while still allowing slight differences between screen types/sizes.

Keep this in mind if you’re building your own site - and as always, if you need any assistance, I am only an email away! I got you 💁📥