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Mobile Might Not Be The Future But it is Definitely a Necessity

A few weeks back I added a mobile theme to this blog, and today I thought it would be interesting to post an update on the changes I’ve seen in site traffic.

There weren’t a lot of requests for the mobile theme, and in fact several people insisted that I didn’t need one because I had a full RSS feed.  Their argument was that if anyone wanted to read my blog they could use an app like pulse, Flipboard, and the like to read the posts.  I happen to agree with that sentiment but it looks like not everyone does. While only a handful of readers asked for a mobile theme, a rather larger number have started using it.

I’m not going to share my full traffic stats, but I will note that TDR’s site traffic in May looks to be about 10% above April (not bad for this time of year on a tech blog). But what’s even better is that my mobile traffic has grown as a percentage of the whole.  iPhone traffic is up a tenth of a point over the past 2 plus weeks, and I’m also seeing slight gains in LG, Samsung, Ericson, and other branded smartphone browsers. That’s good, but I’ve seen a very nice bump in traffic for Android.

Gadgets running on Android accounted for 7.3% of my traffic in April (same for previous months), while in May they account for 8.4%. That’s an increase of  over a percentage point in just over 2 weeks, and it’s still growing.

I’ll skip the math, but if the Android traffic continues to grow at this rate then I expect to see Android’s share of my site’s traffic grow at an increase of 2 percentage points each month (and that’s not counting the boost from other mobile OSes). That alone should be enough to convince anyone of the value of adding a mobile site. And even if it tops out at 15% or even 10%, that’s still going to be more traffic than I had before.

And all it cost me was a couple nights looking at plugins for sharing options and tweaking the layout – stuff I would have done anyway.

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Comments


Simon May 30, 2012 um 1:29 pm

I noticed recently in setting up a WordPress blog, that their default theme is designed from the ground-up to be viewed on any sized screen (from the 3 inch to the 23 inch). Google blogger has also introduced default mobile themes.

Anyone with any sort of serious public website should make sure it works on mobile.


monopole May 30, 2012 um 1:32 pm

Mobile is part of the future. The future isn’t a zero sum game where "there can only be one!"


Mike Cane May 30, 2012 um 7:26 pm

Free WP has a mobile theme. Unfortunately, Stats doesn’t show me what %tage is mobile.


Onswipe Launches New Theme Builder, iPhone Blog Theme – The Digital Reader May 31, 2012 um 7:03 pm

[…] have observed a noticeable increase in traffic, just like I reported having observed on my own blog earlier this week.  While I had seen a 20% or more growth in mobile traffic (in less than a month), some of […]


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