Google reports that over 50% of their searches are made from mobile devices.  A mobile device in their eyes includes smartphones and tablets.

In addition, during the past year, Google will now rank websites based on whether or not they were mobile friendly. 37% of Light Space & Time’s traffic comes from mobile devices.  This percentage is below the 50% level that Google claims, but it is still more than 1/3 of our sites’ traffic, which makes it significant.  Luckily for us, we run a WordPress website and were able to use a plugin in order to make our site mobile friendly.

Is your art website mobile friendly?  If not, it should be.  The growth of mobile computing is undeniable and the numbers continue to increase.  An interesting sidebar to these numbers is that the growth of mobile searches has not taken away from the number of desktop searches.  The number of mobile searches has increased while the number of desktop searches has remained unchanged.  Here is Google’s link to test to see if your website is mobile friendly or not.  We also suggest using the following tool:  Website Planet's Responsive Checker. 

If you care about traffic and the demographics of the people visiting your art website, then your site should be set up for both desktop and mobile computing.  Most new sites have this capability.   If yours does not, it may be time to think about either switching to a new site or taking the necessary steps to make your existing site mobile friendly.

Remember, a successful website is all about page rank and visitors.  To exclude a large and increasing amount of traffic due to not being a mobile-friendly site makes little sense today and will make even less sense in the future.