Is your website mobile friendly?

Video Transcript

Hey there, I’m Kaili, and today we’re going to give you some tips for making your website mobile friendly.

So, what does that even mean?

A mobile friendly website simply means that the website is designed to create a good experience for somebody who visits that site from their phone or other mobile device.

You’ve likely heard that your website should be mobile friendly or responsive. That is so the user can have a better experience when they are on your website. You’ll keep their engagement longer and help improve your website’s rankings in search engine results.

Google has announced that in July of this year, it will use mobile website speeds as a ranking factor for mobile users - This means that when someone conducts a search on a cell phone, Google will use your website’s pagespeed to help determine where your website shows up in the search results.

What does it take to make a website mobile friendly?

Well, there’s a lot that goes into it, but maybe we can help you get started.

A great first step is to simply test your site to see how mobile friendly it already is. Google has a great resource for this.

Testing

Start by going to testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com. I’ll provide a link to this below the video.

I’ll test one of our websites so you can see how it works. Once you’ve gotten to the page, simply paste your website’s URL into the text box that is provided. And click the arrow to start.

It will tell you how long your website is going to take to load on a 3G network, an estimated visitor loss (if you have a slower website), and a general score for the mobile friendliness of your website, like good, fair, or poor.

Results

You can scroll down the page to see how your website compares with other websites in your industry - and it might automatically choose an industry for you, but if it doesn’t, you can change it by clicking the drop down arrow by the industry and selecting the one that is relevant for you.

Fixes

If you scroll down one more time, Google will give you some ideas for what you can do to reduce your load time and keep more visitors on your site longer. Click “see top fixes” for the recommendations.

It might mention things here like renderblocking on Javascript, leverage caching, and optimizing images. Some of these things might require your web developer’s help, but there are some things you can do on your own.

Optimizing images, for example. Images can take up a lot of space and can take a decent time to load, but if you resize and compress them, they can improve your loading speed a lot! We have another video that shows you exactly how to do this.

Responsive Websites

But mobile-friendliness is more than just page speed. It is the adaptability of your website to a mobile device. Is your website responsive?

And by responsive, I mean this - look how I can move the page around and all of the elements on the page move and adjust to fit the screen. You want your website to look good on a mobile screen size - so make sure it is responsive, too.

It’s important to update your website with these changes because Google is constantly adapting to make sure it provides its users websites that will create a friendly experience for them. And don’t you want to keep your website visitors happy?

These are just some of the factors that go into creating a mobile-friendly website. If your website isn’t mobile friendly yet, it’s time to get to work.

Thanks for watching!