Mobile Browser Detection: How Does It Work?

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Mobile browser detection and redirect is a way to allow people to visit your website via mobile, without having to suffer through the usual hassle of blowing up the screen, pinching it, sliding it up, down, or side to side. Oftentimes when people visit a mobile site, they get frustrated because the ease of getting around the site is basically non-existent. This results in people leaving your site before actually getting into the meat and potatoes of it. If you install mobile browser detection and redirect, a service offered by yours truly, AnchorMobile, you will start to keep customers on your site, for longer periods of time, and ultimately increase sales through better customer experience.

In its simplest terms, mobile browser detection is a type of software you install on your website that recognizes when mobile devices are trying to access it. Once the device is recognized, the software will then redirect the end user to a dedicated mobile site, or adjust the format of the website to fit the end user’s device. Note the fact that it doesn’t matter what type of mobile device it is; it can be a smart phone, a tablet, portable digital assistant, or a portable media player. The software can recognize all these devices and make it significantly easier for users and potential customers to navigate your site via mobile.

Along with the software mentioned above, browser sniffing is a technique used in this
software that determines the type of browser the visitor is using. This determination
allows the software to send browser-appropriate content to the user. The purpose of this
is to avoid incongruity between different browsers such as the interpretation of HTML,
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and Document Object Model (DOM).

This software is important for a number of reasons. The first, and probably most
shocking, fact about websites is that only 10 percent of them are mobile friendly. That
means 90 percent of the websites you visit via your mobile device is going to be difficult
to navigate. That’s a lot of lost business due to a simple problem that can simply be fixed
using this software. Everyone today owns some sort of a mobile device. Making your website mobile friendly should be your top marketing priority followed by creating a complete mobile strategy that fits in with your other marketing and advertising methods.