You should never use PDF for content that you expect users to read online. Why? Because PDFs are designed for printed, letter-sized pieces of paper not to display in a browser window.

Forcing users to browse PDF documents make the website’s usability approximately 300% worse relative to HTML pages. 

Each and every page of the Riverside website has a print tool embedded within it so the customer is able to easily view the content on paper if they wish.

Problems with PDF:

• Defies Riverside Accessibility standards; PDF creates significant barriers for those with disabilities
• Lack website navigation bars and other tools that might help users move within the information space and relate to the rest of the website. If a user has come through a search engine, how can that visitor easily access other content on the site?
• 49% of Riverside users access the website through a mobile device – This will use a large amount of data that may cost a customer a significant amount of money  to download a PDF compared to reading a html page on the website 
• Bad SEO – they can be less than ideal for 508 compliance (images within a PDF can’t be optimised) and you can’t implement structured markup in Google
• You can’t track PDFs in Google Analytics so we lose page statistics