Why do so many Long Island companies remain mobile-unfriendly?

February 18, 2016: There’s no question that having a mobile-friendly web site provides tangible competitive advantages to businesses in 2016.

Mobile click volume now exceeds desktop click volume in many industry sectors. Google rewards mobile-friendly sites with higher rankings on search results, boosting traffic and conversions. Consumers are increasingly reaching for their mobile phones when researching pre-purchase decisions, so showing up and looking good on the small screen is a mandate for any business interested in the future.

Unfortunately, when Didit surveyed the websites of Long Island’s top public companies last April to evaluate their mobile-friendliness, the data painted a grim picture.  Of 53 top LI company sites surveyed, only 12 were mobile-friendly – a shockingly high 78 percent failure rate for the entire group.

In late January 2016, nine months after our first evaluation, we re-tested all 53 sites. Our hope was to find that substantial improvements had been made.

The results of these new tests — while not great — were not quite as alarming as they were nine months ago.

Results

Our methodology – using Google’s Mobile Friendly Test Page, was very simple: we simply entered each company’s URL into the page and logged the results.

Eight Long Island companies that originally failed Google’s Mobile Friendly Test now pass it with flying colors. These include 1-800-Flowers.com, Aeroflex Holding, CVD Equipment, Dealertrack, Suffolk Bancorp, Veeco, Verint Systems, and Vicon Industries.

The management of these companies should be congratulated for making the required upgrades. Such improvements indicate a willingness to adapt their web properties to accord with today’s increasingly mobile usage patterns.

At the same time, however, our tests also revealed that 33 companies remain mobile-unfriendly, which translates to a 62 percent failure rate – still among the worst encountered in any industry segment we’ve tested.

What must be done

We are at a loss to explain why the high failure among large-cap Long Island companies persists today. We are especially puzzled by the fact that several failing companies proudly bill themselves – right on their websites — as being leaders in the bio-tech/IT sector, where the virtues of fielding a modern, customer-friendly infrastructure would be assumed to be self-evident.

We are aware that website maintenance is often not a task always accorded top priority in senior managements’ to-do lists. We also know that the costs associated with making the improvements necessary to field a modern, responsive site are not always trivial, especially if the server/hosting infrastructure is itself archaic.

But we are equally aware that failing to make the investments necessary to convey a positive impression to the world – which is largely online today, with an increased percentage turning to their mobile devices first – is a serious error whose costs, over time, can vastly exceed those associated with proper site maintenance.

Today, Long Island competes globally, as well as regionally, and top management should realize that customers and prospects often make judgments – fairly or unfairly – on the basis of the corporate website, not an in-person visit.  If this site happens to look like it was built in the mid-1990s, or acts unpredictably, or is slow to load, or can’t be used on a mobile device, the company responsible for making it will not benefit. Instead, the benefit will pass to a company that has fielded such a site.

Long Island has a proud history of technological achievement, companies here are doing many innovative things, and their advancements shouldn’t be marred by dysfunctional, unusable sites that frustrate and confuse mobile users.

We hope the next time we test these companies, we’ll see more evidence of progress.

Because in a “mobile-first” world, Long Island business needs to lead the pack, not lag in the back.