Is your website mobile-friendly?

• If your answer to this question is no, continue reading.
• If your answer is “I don’t know”, continue reading.
• If your answer is yes, then you’re probably aware of all the information below, but you can continue reading as well.

Not having a mobile-friendly website is no longer an option as the number of mobile users is increasing day by day, and in addition, users spend most of their online time on their mobile device, as shown on the comScore reports below.

 

 

Mobile First Indexing

The fact that mobile usage is increasing makes Google give more and more importance to the fact that every website can be easily accessed and used on a mobile device.

• In April 2015, Google announced that they were rolling out a “Mobile-friendly Update”, where they were boosting mobile-friendly pages.

This update was affecting only the ranking on mobile devices and to individual pages and not the whole website. This means that the pages on your site that were not mobile-friendly went down on the search results on mobile devices.

It was followed by one other “Mobile-Friendly” update in May 2016

 

• In November 2016 Google announced their “Mobile First Indexing” that they will start giving more importance to the mobile version of your website.

This new update affects not only the pages, but instead will affect the whole website. A website with pages that are not optimized for mobile will see decrease its rankings not only in mobile devices, also in desktop and tablet devices.

This update is just in its testing stage but will start rolling out in stages next year, 2018. You still have time to change to a mobile-friendly website.

 

Website Mobile-Friendly Test

The first thing you can do to check if your website is mobile-friendly is go to your mobile, look for your website on Google and test how easy it is to navigate and perform any action you have determined.

In addition, Google is making it easy for you to check whether your website is mobile-friendly or not. Google has made available a tool where you can introduce your website URL to check if it is mobile-friendly.

Then you will receive a message informing you if your website is mobile-friendly.

Mobile-friendly Page

Page Not Mobile-friendly

If it is not mobile-friendly, you will receive instructions on which actions to take in order to achieve it.

You can also go to Search Console > Search Traffic > Mobile Usability and there you would see if Google has detected any usability errors on the mobile version of your site.

The best way to ensure that your website is mobile-friendly is using a responsive web design as recommended by Google, that’s why at The Web Centre all our websites are responsive and, consequently, mobile-friendly.

Some factors that need to be taken into account are:

• Size font, as in mobiles a bigger font will be needed
• Easy to follow navigation on mobile where the screen is smaller
• Larger touch buttons than in desktop
• The content fits each type of screen and can be easily read in all of them
• Right Spacing
• Site Speed
• Be sure that your mobile version has all the content that you want to rank for

 

 

 

In conclusion, your website needs to give a good user experience on any type of device. Is your website mobile friendly? Check it out!  If you find out that it is still not mobile-friendly, be aware that you will need a few changes. At The Web Centre, we can help you!