What can you do to make sure your site is mobile ready?

Mobile technology is increasingly becoming the avenue for disseminating news and information during emergencies. According to a recent Pew study, 95% of Millennials own a cell phone, but only 57% own a desktop computer. How do you think they stayed connected? Companies whose businesses are impacted by disasters should keep this in mind when developing their sites to ensure that they are also mobile ready.


So what can you do to make sure your site is mobile ready?

• Monitor your site regularly to determine fluctuations in performance. With regular monitoring you can identify key areas where your mobile site isn't holding up in terms of speed and reliability.  You don't know when a natural disaster will strike. If it happens and users aren't sitting at their desk, chances are that they'll be reaching for their smartphone. Under normal conditions it's not uncommon to see increases in mobile traffic outside of traditional working hours.  During an emergency or big news story, that percentage can grow quite a bit.

• Load test your site to make sure it can handle certain amounts of traffic, especially for uncertain conditions. Let's say that your website is well-built, like a brick house (as opposed to straw or sticks), at some level of visitor traffic it will come down. It's important that you know that breaking point so that you can be prepared for all but the unlikeliest of scenarios.  When a Category 5 storm hits, resulting in a flood of hits to your mobile website, don't leave your visitors in the dark because your server can't handle the load.

 These are basic recommendations for any company with a mobile website.  But for a company providing news and information to an increasingly mobile population, they should be standard practice.

Related Articles:

1. Monitoring User Experience of the Cloud
2. Enhance Web Performance with Best practices
3. Website Performance: More Than Just Speed
4. The impact of web load testing on performance