What is a Mobile Friendly Website? Should I have one?
A mobile friendly website is a site that displays on mobile devices such as IPad, tablets and smart/mobile phones. The site should be easy to view (mobile screens are much smaller than desktop and tablet) and load fast as many people accessing your site will be on the go using 3G and 4G. Having to pinch and zoom is downright annoying and as it is 2017 there really is no need for this.
The answer to should you have one is simple…Yes!
Google state:
If you haven’t made your website mobile-friendly, you should.
The majority of visitors to your site are likely to be using a mobile device.
In 2015 mobile search (on Google) overtook traditional desktop search and there is no let-up in the rise and rise of people using mobile devices to access websites. Surprisingly 77% of mobile searches (in the USA) take place at home or work. Desktop is far from dead though as a lot of mobile activity still relates to just social media access and checking emails.
Google continues to accommodate and make mobile search better and reward those sites that have a mobile friendly website ahead of those that haven’t. They now conduct separate searches for mobile and desktop. Your website that looks great on a desktop with lots of fancy elements to it could rank on page 1 for a particular term in desktop search but appear much lower in the mobile results which means you are missing out on valuable traffic you could easily be getting.
The following is a rough guide to what counts when determining whether a page is mobile friendly
- Avoids software that is not common on mobile devices, like Flash
- Uses text that is readable without zooming
- Sizes content to the screen so users don’t have to scroll horizontally or zoom
- Places links far enough apart so that the correct one can be easily tapped
If you don’t know whether your website is mobile friendly the easiest way to check is to enter your website address at the Google Mobile Friendly Test ( https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/ ) This free service will analyse your webpage and report if it has mobile friendly design. This website https://www.creative-seo-solutions.com is mobile friendly so take a look on your phone or tablet and see how it looks.
If your site does not have mobile friendly design the test results will display the areas which need to be worked on to ensure the site is mobile friendly. If you have a Google Webmaster Tools account you can also go to the Mobile Usability item in the Search Traffic Menu.
Mobile Usability in Google Webmaster Tools
If you do not have a mobile friendly website there are a number of methods you can use to configure your website most notably, Responsive Design, Dynamic Serving and Separate URLs. We recommend Responsive Design as it is the easiest to implement and you have one site to update which moves freely across all devices.
Google recommend using responsive web design because it:
- Makes it easier for users to share and link to your content with a single URL.
- Helps Google’s algorithms accurately assign indexing properties to the page rather than needing to signal the existence of corresponding desktop/mobile pages.
- Requires less engineering time to maintain multiple pages for the same content.
- Reduces the possibility of the common mistakes that affect mobile sites.
- Requires no redirection for users to have a device-optimized view, which reduces load time. Also, user agent-based redirection is error-prone and can degrade your site’s user experience (see Pitfalls when detecting user agents” section for details).
- Saves resources when Googlebot crawls your site. For responsive web design pages, a single Googlebot user agent only needs to crawl your page once, rather than crawling multiple times with different Googlebot user agents to retrieve all versions of the content. This improvement in crawling efficiency can indirectly help Google index more of your site’s content and keep it appropriately fresh.
- This is from: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/responsive-design
If you would like to find out more about mobile friendly web design in Carlisle, Cumbria or elsewhere in the UK please get in touch to discuss your aims.
