Mobile-Friendly Websites

Is your website Google Mobile-Friendly?

Here’s what Google say about their Mobile-Friendly rollout:

Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. 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 optimised for their devices.

They have also published a testing tool, usability reports and other avenues to encourage webmasters convince clients to go mobile-friendly.

You can test whether your site is mobile-friendly by using the Google Webmaster Tools Mobile-Friendly Test. If your site fails, or doesn’t render in the way you’d expect, please contact us and we’ll help you fix the problem.

Google have been experimenting with mobile-friendly factors and have been pushing mobile-friendly labels in search results.

If you’re searching on Google with a mobile, you should see a small green phone icon to the left of a mobile-friendly website. (Although at this time it only seems to work on Google Smartphones).

What constitutes a mobile-friendly website?

• Configured viewport
• Not fixed-width
• Matching content sizes
• Legible font sizes
• Clickable tap-targets for links, buttons, phone numbers etc
• Primary content not in Flash (.swf)

What’s non mobile-friendly – in regular terminology?

Think about your own experience surfing the web with a mobile phone. What really annoys you? I’ll bet it would one or more of the following:

• Pages are slow to load.
• Having to pinch and zoom to read content.
• Text that is too hard to read without zooming (and then of course, you have to flip the phone on it’s side so you can pan across the text column).
• Navigation systems that seem to take you exactly where you don’t want to go, or sub menus that appear and then immediately disappear, (or don’t appear at all).
• Having to copy and paste a telephone number (or try and remember it so you can dial it manually).
• Contact forms, or forms of any kind that render in miniature, and then don’t seem to collect your info correctly.

Does any of that ring any bells for you?

Some facts about mobile phone users (You and me included):

• 61% of users are unlikely to return to a website that they had trouble with.
• 40% will visit a mobile-friendly competitor site instead.