The web has gone mobile. Is your Victoria business website mobile-ready?

New technologies like Progressive Web Apps (PWA) and Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) drive web development trends. However, responsive web design, a relatively old technology, remains front and center and, in many instances, is still ignored to the peril of many Victoria business owners.

The fact is, a responsive website - once a good-to-have feature - is now a must-have feature.

The overwhelming majority of Victoria users are using mobile devices to access the web. A Victoria business website unable to resize to users' smaller mobile viewport is often illegible and useless to potential customers and clients.

In addition, Google has introduced mobile-first indexing. That means a Victoria website's ranking will depend on how well it's optimized for mobile devices.

There are several tools to determine whether your Victoria website is mobile-ready - try this Google tool

To rank well on Google and convert prospects to customers on your Victoria Business Website, you must speed up delivery and performance.

Google has taken significant steps to enhance the mobile browsing experience. Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages Project (AMP) is now one of the latest and most popular web technologies.

AMP technology encourages building websites that load instantly and work smoothly across all mobile devices.

The goal is to have AMP pages load for about 2 seconds - non-AMP pages can take up to 22 seconds to load.

Google favors fast-loading websites, so AMP pages can increase your Victoria business website’s ranking and visibility, which means the AMP technology is also great for SEO.

To accelerate your Victoria business website, be ready to use a new, purpose-built AMP HTML open framework. Google has launched a website that contains documentation and guidelines.

Victoria web development trends change every single year. For Victoria business owners and decision-makers, it's vital to be familiar with changes to remain relevant and competitive.

The first development trend we will focus on in this multi-part series of articles are Progressive Web Apps (PWA).

A PWA is mobile web page that acts and feels like a regular, native app.

Like apps most users are already familiar with, a PWA can be accessed via the home screen of a smartphone and share many of the same functionalities of native apps, providing a nearly identical user experience.

However, PWA pushes the world wide web forward making website browsing experience closer to native mobile applications and, therefore, more friendly to users. Ultimately, a PWA is a website which offers functionality traditionally available to native apps (e.g. push notifications, offline access, hardware access).

Some of the more popular PWAs currently include Starbucks, Housing.com, Flipboard, Alibaba and Forbes.

The motivation behind developing PWAs is the fact mobile views dominate other devices such as desktops or tablets and there is a big gap between using mobile apps and mobile browsers as applications account for more than 80% of the overall time users spend with their gadgets.

Users want fast, easily accessed tools on their mobile devices and PWAs server this purpose.