We Deleted the Desktop Version. Sales Went Up 34%.

Last year, a fashion brand came to us with a problem. Their website conversion rate was stuck at 1.2%. Industry average is around 2.5%.

We dug into the data. 94% of their traffic was mobile. But they'd been pouring money into their desktop experience because "that's where people actually buy."

Except... that wasn't true. The 6% desktop users weren't buying more—they were just slightly easier to measure.

We made a radical proposal: forget desktop. Build the entire experience as a mobile-first PWA. Desktop users would get the same thing, just scaled up.

The client was nervous. Their board was nervous. I was a little nervous.

Three months later:

Checkout completion: up 34%. Fewer steps, bigger tap targets, faster loads.

Page speed: improved by 60%. One codebase is easier to optimize than two.

Development time: cut in half. No more "does this work on desktop too?" meetings.

Return visits: up 28%. PWA install prompts meant customers added the store to their home screen.

Here's what I learned: "Mobile-first" has become meaningless. Everyone says it, nobody does it. Real mobile-first means asking, "What if desktop didn't exist?"

This doesn't work for everyone. B2B software, spreadsheet apps, video editing—desktop matters. But if you're selling to consumers under 40? Your desktop site might be a distraction.