Best Ways to Test Your Website’s Mobile-Friendliness
As smartphone and tablet adoption rapidly increases, so does the importance of mobile-friendly websites.If SEO is a core component of your digital marketing strategy, having a mobile–friendly website is becoming essential part.You may not understand the finer points of Google’s algorithms, but you certainly understand the benefits of how the search engine helps point people to your website. Given Google’s most recent algorithm change on April 21, 2015 – designed to favor websites that are mobile-friendly – it’s vital to check whether your website is ready to receive mobile traffic.Here are three tools Google suggests you use:
1. Mobile-Friendly Test Mobile search is getting more and more common, and if your website hasn’t adapted, it’s likely that would-be customers will be frustrated by having to scroll through microscopic text in panorama mode when trying to access your content. It’s a poor user experience and potentially a lost chance at business–especially since Google states “a bad user experience can hurt your site’s ranking in search results.”
Google’s mobile-friendly test will analyze your web page to determine how mobile friendly it is. In addition to the overall experience, Google’s test also looks to see if your site:
Avoids software, such as Flash, that does not work well with mobile devices.
Spaces links appropriately to be easily tapped.
Uses content and screen size that can be read without zooming or scanning.
To learn more about how to make sure your website is mobile friendly, check out Google’s Webmaster’s Mobile Guide.
2. Mobile Usability Tool Google’s Mobile Usability Tool can be an effective way to track your website’s mobile usability over time. The tool features a status tracker showing you when the last test occurred and a history of your site’s usability, as well as the errors the tool encountered during each test.
As a business, your goal should be to see those errors decline in each successive test.
The tool also shows the nature of the errors encountered during any particular test, and you can see a breakdown of all the pages where the error occurred. The tool then provides links to guides showing you how to repair the error.
Use the Mobile Usability Tool as a chance to spot trends on your site, positive or negative, and you’ll be better prepared to make applicable changes as the need arises. The first step to use this tool is to register your website on Google’s Webmaster Tools.
3. PageSpeed Insights Google’s PageSpeed Insights measure the performance of your pages for mobile devices and standard desktop devices. It actually captures your page’s address twice, running one through mobile user-agent and then through a desktop user-agent. Your pages are then scored on a scale of 0-100, with a score of 85 being the benchmark for a page that is “performing well.”