Is Your Website Mobile-Friendly? This Google Tool Can Let You Know
November 1, 2022There was a time when companies would create websites for desktop browsing only. In the mid-2000s when the first Blackberry and iPhone devices came out, companies were advised that they should have “mobile websites” for people to browse—although some choose to make users browse their normal site by pinching and zooming. Usually these sites were built separate from the main website, and designed with limited functionality and limited information compared with the “main” site.
Today the vast majority of people who are browsing the Internet are actually doing it on mobile devices, so it doesn’t make sense for a company to have a limited-functionality mobile site (or worse, no mobile site at all). In fact, the number of mobile browsers overtook desktop browsers sometime around 2014, and today they make up close to 60 percent of all traffic online. So the question remains for companies—is your current website mobile friendly? If the answer is no, you’re likely missing out on a huge opportunity.
The Consequences of a Mobile-Unfriendly Device
There are plenty of reasons you want to have a website that is more mobile friendly, not the least of which is that you want your customers to be able to find you, shop on your site, join your mailing list, or connect with you in some other way from wherever they are and whatever device they have. Another consequence that some companies might not be aware of is the Google penalty. Today if your site is deemed unfriendly for mobile devices, Google will penalize you by lowering your site in search rankings.
Mobile Friendly Testing Tools
If you’re not sure whether you have a mobile friendly site, one easy way to find out is with a new tool that Google released to officially test your site. It’s a streamlined mobile usability tool that not only ranks your site in terms of how easily a mobile user could browse it, but also provides some tools to help you improve if you discover that it’s not, including:
- A site-wide usability report to show you exactly why your site received the mobile-usability score that it did
- General help center articles on how to make sites more user-friendly
- A forum for questions and discussions with Google experts
You can find the tool today at Google’s website and check to see what they think of your site. If you need help building a new website or modifying your current one to be more mobile-friendly, call SEO Werkz, Salt Lake’s premier web design and SEO company today.