Does Your Dance Studio Have A Mobile-Friendly Website?

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More people are using their smartphones to access websites.[/caption]

Have you heard about Google’s mobile-friendly update yet? If not, your website’s ranking in search may have been affected in ways you’re not even aware of.

This update was rolled out on April 21, and was rumored to be bigger than the Panda or Penguin updates.

More and more people are using their mobile devices to access their favorite websites; enough to warrant Google to update their search algorithm to adapt to the times.

So does your dance studio have a mobile-friendly website? Here are some things you should look into.

Your Analytics

First and foremost, you should take a look at your analytics to determine what percentage of your visitors are trying to access your website from their devices.

According to Moz, desktop rankings aren’t affected by the new update. What this means is that if most of your visitors are accessing your site from desktop computers, you don’t have much to worry about… yet.

It would still be wise to prepare for the future, as you never know how your mobile audience could grow in times to come. You can take a moment to breathe a sigh of relief, but don’t stay there. Start taking measures to make your site more mobile-ready, because if it isn’t, your visitors are going to start heading over to your competitor’s website.

Google’s Mobile-Friendliness Tool

A tool that you can use to analyze your website is the Google Mobile-Friendly Test. Using the test, you can find out whether or not your website is mobile-friendly by Google’s standards.

If your page passes the test, you’re good to go! If not, you’re likely going to have to make some changes to your website.

One thing you should know about the mobile-friendly tool is that it evaluates your website on a page-per-page basis, so checking every page can be a time-consuming process.

A good idea would be to start with your most popular pages, and see whether or not they are considered mobile-friendly.

Overall, the tool is far from perfect, and it only gives you a “yes” or “no” answer; there is no in-between. However, it’s still a good starting point.

The Solution

When we were just starting to move into the mobile age, website owners still had a lot of options.

They could ignore mobile and not suffer any major consequences. They could serve a mobile version of their website to mobile visitors. They could develop a responsive website that automatically adjusted to screen size.

Today, the only option worth mentioning is the latter. If you don’t have a responsive website, then it’s not as mobile-friendly as it should be.

Here’s the good news. If you’re using WordPress, there are plenty of responsive themes available; some are free, and some cost a little money, but generally you get what you pay for.

The WPtouch Mobile Plugin is also a popular choice among site owners using WordPress. However, it doesn’t necessarily provide you with a responsive site so much as a mobile theme. From a visitor standpoint, however, this could still work well.

If you aren’t using WordPress, you can add media queries to your CSS to limit the size of certain elements on your site. This isn’t necessarily hard to do, but if you don’t understand CSS, then it can be a little intimidating.

Another option, of course, is to hire a developer that can help you make your site more mobile-friendly. As you can imagine, this type of work is in high demand, so there are plenty of designers at the ready.

Conclusion

Don’t forget: your visitors are ultimately more important than the search engines. The people coming to your website are the people you want to serve first.

With that in mind, you can’t ignore the importance of having a mobile-friendly website, as the number of people accessing the web from their mobile devices is growing every single day.

For more information on dance lessons or to get involved with a dance studio in your area visit DanceHub. Discover dance studios, dance instructors, and dance classes near you.