When Bango surveyed the Top 20 most trafficked PC websites (according to Nielsen Online), we found that half of the sites did not work well on leading mobile phones. Tests were carried out on the Motorola V3 Razr and Nokia 6300 on the AT&T network in the US and Vodafone in the UK. The full results are detailed below.
This is a worrying trend given that typically 5% of visitors to PC websites now come from mobile devices, up from 1% a year ago. The problem is that PC websites are not adapting fast enough to match mobile browsing trends and are failing to present mobile-friendly versions of their sites.
Top 20 most trafficked PC websites, July 2008, Nielsen Online:
| Works well on mobile | Does not work well on mobile |
| eBay www.ebay.com |
Fox www.fox.com |
| YouTube www.youtube.com |
Microsoft www.microsoft.com |
| AOL www.aol.com |
Wikipedia www.wikipedia.org |
| MSN www.msn.com |
Apple www.apple.com |
| Yahoo www.yahoo.com |
About www.about.com |
| Google www.google.com |
Ask www.about.ask.com |
| Amazon www.amazon.com |
Blogger www.blogger.com |
| Weather www.weather.com |
Real Networks www.realnetworks.com |
| Facebook www.facebook.com |
Glam Media www.glammedia.com |
| CNN www.cnn.com |
Craigslist www.craigslist.org |
Some of these sites may have mobile versions – in which case, why didn’t they direct me to the mobile site? Bango’s research reveals that between 3-10% of on-line traffic to a PC website now comes from users entering web addresses on their mobile device. If you have a mobile site then make sure your PC site detects a mobile device and presents the made-for mobile version. If you don’t have a mobile site but want to find out how much mobile traffic you get to your PC site, then our Bango Analytics for PCs helps you do just this.
When an AT&T user in the US visited the Fox, Microsoft or Apple PC sites, they were simply presented with a 413 error “Page cannot be displayed”. The experience for a UK user on Vodafone was somewhat better because the transcoder did present the PC site but as to you see with the Wikipedia example, it requires a lot of scrolling to get to the part you want and this is definitely not a good user experience.
I was particularly impressed with the Yahoo mobile site as it recognized my device and presented me with a great user experience, as did the MSN service (so not all bad news for Microsoft!).
Poor experience:
 The Apple PC site for an AT&T user |
 The poor Wikipedia user experience |
Good experience:
 Yahoo detects my mobile device and even knows which one |
 The MSN service on my mobile |
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