Mobile-first Redesign Increases Traffic to Key Websites

 

A year after launching the redesigned mobile-first utoledo.edu website as part of a University-wide rebranding effort, we have realized a noticeable increase in interactions with our most important recruitment and reputation building content.

UToledo moved to a mobile-optimized site to better reach our audience of prospective students who are being introduced to UToledo primarily on a smartphone. In comparing the week of July 12-18, 2020 with the same week in 2018, utoledo.edu experienced a 49.54% increase in mobile visits (15,149 in 2018 compared to 22,654 in 2020).

Most notable in the redesigned website is the sticky menu focused on call to actions — visit, apply and give. From July 2019 to July 2020 visits to the apply page rose 66.18% (230,162 vs. 138,502) and pageviews to the visit page rose 64.76% (108,597 vs. 65,911).

Ongoing efforts during the past year also included reformatting and simplifying key webpages with concise text and clear calls to action that lead visitors to next steps. This optimized focus not only gets site visitors to content more quickly but maximizes the smaller space on cell phones. For example, within one month of redesigning the College of Law homepage it experienced a 226% rise in traffic to the apply page in June 2020 when compared to June 2019.

Search engine optimization (SEO) continues to be a focus of web strategy because those using a mobile device rely heavily on search to find desired pages. Using the right key words, our team can craft content with strong headlines and subheads, careful repetition of key words, an authoritative voice and optimized web coding to increase the searchability of web pages.