By now you've probably heard about Google's latest change wherein they start taking into account your site's responsiveness, perhaps even received an email from Google regarding your site's current standings. What isn't clear is precisely what the impact to your site and your site's search ranking could be. The bottom line is if one out of five visitors to your site is using a mobile device, your site traffic could see a significant reduction.
In late March, we started receiving emails that we needed to "fix mobile-related issues" with our site. On clicking their link, we were immediately greeted with this score:
We had to do a little looking into the reasoning behind the scores and the emails. This particular score seems pretty decent and, as far as the user experience goes, it is and it's really the most important score. The other score, the site speed, should be addressed, but the user experience is what indicates your site is responsive and has the greatest impact on your mobile traffic. If you don't get a lot of mobile traffic, this won't be as big of a concern. If half your traffic comes from mobile devices, however, you could end up losing 75% of the mobile traffic to your site (about 38% of your overall traffic).
Looking at these two sets of mobile statistics (from two different sites we own). The one on the left may lose approximately 10-11% of its traffic (were it not mobile-friendly) and the one on the right stands to lose approximately 28% of its overall traffic (again, were it not mobile-friendly). If less than 10% of your traffic is from mobile devices, you may need to consider whether your site is mobile-friendly or it's just your target market (the latter of which is much less likely these days).
If most of your traffic comes from laptops/desktops, you're less likely to see a significant impact. If you aren't sure about your mobile traffic statistics or just want to find out a little more about your analytics data, we're happy to discuss it with you.