Is your site mobile-friendly? Google updated the way they rank websites that are not mobile-friendly on April 21st, an update that has been nicknamed “Mobilegeddon”. A site that isn’t now ready for mobile devices could lose search ranking for searches on mobile devices. Google isn’t be penalizing non-mobile sites but is boosting mobile-friendly sites, even those that are not providing responsive design.
Having a mobile-friendly site is not just for the benefit of Google. It will make your site perform better for your customers. Check your Google Analytics account to see how many visitors you have from mobile phones and tablets. You’ll see that mobile traffic is becoming a significant portion of your web traffic. It’s important that your site works well on all devices.
Test to see how mobile friendly your site is now.
Visit Google’s Mobile Friendly Test and enter your site’s web address. You can check all of the pages on your site with the Mobile Usability Report in Google Webmaster Tools. Webmaster Tools provides a wealth of information about your site including any errors that may have occurred. Be sure to monitor this account on a regular basis.
After your testing is done, don’t panic if your site isn’t optimized for mobile traffic. Google’s recommendation, and ours, is to convert your site to a responsive or adaptive design. A temporary and reasonably priced solution is to add a separate mobile site using a mobile site service. Or you could add a plugin to a WordPress site that will switch it to a mobile theme for mobile visitors. You could also work on making your most important content mobile-ready first if you’re not ready to redo your site. Contact us if you have any questions about the mobile update or would like help with improving your website’s appearance on mobile devices.
