It's a Start - Mobile Web Has Grown 2,000 Percent

We all know that the mobile Web is experiencing an explosive growth spurt right now, but few actually predicted these kinds of fireworks.

The 2010 Mobile Web Progress report from dotMobi found that there are more than 3 million mobile-ready websites today - that's a 2,000-percent increase from the 150,000 sites revealed in the 2008 study. To compare it to the meteoric rise of the desktop Web, the number of websites grew from 150,000 to 2 million between 1996 and 1998 - a growth of only 1,333 percent.

And, most experts agree that this is just the tip of the mobile iceberg.

In its report, dotMobi broke down the mobile-readiness of the world's top 500,000 websites as ranked by intelligence firm Alexa. Just over 40 percent of the top 1,000 sites are mobile-optimized, while 29.7 percent of the top 10,000 sites fall into that category, as do 19.3 percent of the top 500,000.

Is your website mobile-ready? More importantly, does it need to be?

Judging from the statistics above and the overwhelming growth of the mobile Web, the answer is eventually going to be yes. But the best way to determine the urgency of that transition can be found in your analytics.

Determine the percentage of traffic that presently visits your site through mobile devices, and find out what are the most common results of that traffic. It is from there that you should be able to draw conclusions about the immediacy of a more mobile-friendly platform for your website.