David Hall
According to Trinity Digital Marketing, there are over 1.2 billion people accessing the Internet via their mobile devices.
The global mobile traffic makes up 15% of all Internet traffic as stated by Internet Trends 2013.
For these reasons, Google announced that starting on April 21, 2015, they will be using website mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal in search results. This means it will be very important to check if your website is mobile friendly as Google will be ranking websites higher that are optimized for mobile devices.
How to Check If Your Website Is Mobile Friendly?
Google has provided tools to check of your websites are mobile friendly or not. If you have already registered your website with Google Webmaster Tools, you might have already received an email like the one below.
I have already fixed the website in question, but this was the warning letter I received.
The “Inspect Mobile Issues” link will send you to the Google Webmaster Tools website and display all the pages that have mobile issues.
The “Follow Our Guidelines” link will show you the Recommended Best Practices for Website Development according to Google.
If you want to test and verify a single page on your website, Google provides a Mobile-Friendly Test Tool. The test tool will check the specific URL provided and report if the page has a mobile-friendly design or not.
How to View Your Website as a Mobile Device
If you have Google Chrome installed, you have a very powerful testing tool.
To test to see if your site is mobile friendly, open up your website and go to the menu (More Tools -> Develop Tools) or just press F12. This will open up the Chrome Developer tools window.
Along the bottom of the window, is a Search tool icon followed by a mobile device icon. It is currently highlighted in yellow, click this and your website will be in mobile view.
At the top of the window on the left hand side, you can select the device you want to emulate (like a Apple iPhone or Samsung Phone). This is great to testing the resolution of your website on the specific device. Please note – You might need to refresh the page for the website to load correctly for the emulated device.
On the top on the right hand side, you can select the network speed or internet speed. This is a great way to view a website on a 2G (250 kbps), 3G (750 kbps) and 4G (4 Mbps) network vs a WiFi connection.
Important – Testing Mobile Usability on Realistic Mobile Speeds
Many people forget to test usability of a website on a mobile device using realistic speeds, most mobile networks don’t have a 30+ Mbps. Therefore, it is important to see how much CSS, javascript and other libraries are being sent to mobile devices and how it impacts the website loading time.
If your mobile site is taking more than 10 seconds to load, you will lose most of your traffic.
Fixing Websites that are Not Mobile Friendly
In my next blog post, I will cover the steps on how to make your existing website mobile friendly for your customers.