With the explosive growth of smartphones (like the iPhone) and tablets (like the iPad.) Web users are starting to spend a lot less time clicking away on their computers and a lot more time tapping away on their mobile devices.

Here are some quick facts on the growth of mobile and what to do about it.

– By 2014, more people will access the Internet on their mobile device (phone or tablet) than on their computer.

– Nearly 1.1 billion people around the world are using a smartphone

– One half of all local searches occur on a mobile device

– 1 in 5 users use their mobile device to scan barcodes and compare products, often right in the store. According to Motorola, 39% of customers walking out of a store did so because they were influenced by their smartphone.

– Mobile users are very social with one-third of all Facebook users and half of all Twitter users accessing the site from mobile devices

(source: Microsoft)

Optimizing Your Website For The Mobile Web
With more users switching to mobile devices, you need to ensure that your website can meet their needs. More than 70% of users expect the mobile site to load as quickly as the desktop version and 74% of mobile users will not wait more than 5 seconds for the site to load. If your site does not work the last time the user visited, nearly 50% will never return. (source: Gomez)

Simplicity is the key to optimizing your mobile website. The most efficient layouts are simple one-column pages. If your mobile page has collapsible categories that allows users to only expand the part they are interested in, even better. You will need to use bigger buttons on your mobile site because users will be tapping with their thumbs rather than mouse clicks, you want to avoid sending the user somewhere they didn’t want to go.