Is your website mobile friendly

Date:
10/03/2015
By:
Paul Baguley
Category:
Mobile

On April 21st Google are going to be making changes to how they crawl and index your website for mobile. They have said “This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results. Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimized for their devices.” This means that if your website is not mobile-friendly that your website may suffer in Google mobile searches.

Mobile-Friendly

Google are making these changes as more users search via mobile than desktop and in 2014 mobile exceeded PC in Internet usage for the first time in history, Google also need to offer better results for its users so they still use Google.

Currently Google is displaying a tag next to a mobile friendly website in search results indicating to the user this is suitable for mobiles

How to know if your website is Mobile-Friendly

If you are unsure if your website is mobile-friendly then test a few pages using Google’s very own Mobile Friendly Test this will scan your URL and let you know if it is suitable for mobiles.

If it is it will look like this

Mobile-Friendly Good

If it isn’t it will look like this

mobile-friendly-test-bad

If you would like a report on the whole of your site and not individual url then the best place is your Webmaster Tools in your Mobile Usability Report

Don’t Worry

If you haven’t got a mobile friendly website and now think you need to go out and spend money so you don’t lose business another check would be in your Google Analytics and viewing your devices report.

What you are looking for is seeing where are you currently getting traffic from such as desktop, tablet or mobile.

Analytics Mobile

The example above shows that the website is getting 82% of visits from desktop and only 18 from mobile and table. If you know that you have good rankings on mobile then most likely your target audience prefers to use desktop to view your website. This means that having a mobile friendly website is not too critical in the short-term.

Summary

  • Google are making changes on April 21st 2015 to the way mobile search results will look
  • Google showing mobile friendly results using a tag
  • Test a URL using Mobile Friendly Test
  • Review your site in Webmaster Tools
  • Check Analytics Device report for Desktop, Tablet and Mobile ratio