What is compatibility?

Does your website perform against your audience well? If you're selling to 18-25 year olds, do you know if your site even works on the latest mobile phone and looks good? How about their parent's laptop(s) or desktops?

When building a website, it's often very easy to just look at things on a desktop - it's most likely where your emails are, and the device you use most in the office - however that's not representative of your client base all the time.

People are browsing more and more on the go, using mobiles, tablets and other smart devices to read and digest data. Even some smart fridges have built in browsers now!

To be competitive, you have to be compatible as much as possible, and balance up costs to benefits / return. Here's a few considerations when looking at your site's compatibility

Browsers

Incredibly, as a developer this astounds me, not everyone uses Google Chrome. Some use Mozilla Firefox, Safari, etc. there's even some people who use Internet Explorer 👀

How well does your site perform on these browsers? Do you even need to consider them? Have a look at the following before considering extra work;

• What's the distribution of your users/traffic that you're impacting based on compatibility? If there's one person out of thousands using an old version of IE - probably best not spend 000's on upgrading your site to work for them
• Is the browser supported by the manufacturer / vendor?

Versions of Internet Explorer older than IE11 are not supported by Windows. You do not need to support them. Simply encourage your users to upgrade their browser - it's for their own good.

Mobile / Tablet / Desktop

For the first time mobile phones now outnumber the amount of people in certain countries in the world. More people consume their internet data via a mobile / tablet, and you need to be sure that you're able to grab that opportunity.

At CleverEgg, we always build mobile first. That means that no matter the device, we know it'll display in a good fashion and you're ready for anything.

There's considerations to take into account though;

• You can't hover on a phone / tablet, how do you handle those interactions / animations?
• There's less space to show off your product.
• Mobile connectivity is not always reliable, how to you perform on a low speed connection?

"Quirks" of certain setups

All browsers, and their counterparts on other devices, behave differently based on the code that your website gives them.

A number input on Safari will look and act wildly different to that of one in Chrome for example. It's a common annoyance for all web / front-end developers.

Have you tested all the common combinations of browsers, and devices for your clients? If not, get in touch and we can do this for you!

How does it impact my business?

If your site isn't working right, chances are, people are going to click away or not bother at all. You'll find a few things are happening;

• Your bounce rate is higher than "average", as people come to you and see a broken / dysfunctional site - they then leave for a competitor, or to do something else entirely
• Sales will be lower than normal across certain devices / browsers. This normally means there's something on the pages holding up your customers and denying you that sale!

Getting better at it

If you're looking at improving your business' website across devices and browsers, be sure to test them all in development and check your analytics often to see the imapcts.

As always, we're here to help, so if you want your site reviewing - get in contact and we'll give you a full website report including; Speed, Compatibility, Security, and much more

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