Make sure your website is mobile friendly

Original post July 2019 – updated October 2021

Back in November 2016, Google announced that their ranking algorithms would gradually start making more use of the mobile versions of website pages rather than the desktop version of a page’s content to evaluate its relevance to the user since progressively more and more searches are being carried out on mobile rather than on desktop devices.

If your website doesn’t have a mobile version (e.g. it still shows a shrunken view of the desktop version so you have to “pinch and zoom” or scroll across to read the content) or it does not dynamically adapt for different screen sizes, then this can cause problems when the search engine tries to index your content and hence your positions in the search results could be detrimentally affected.

Google’s crawling of the web using their smartphone Googlebot means that if the mobile page it sees has different or less content than the desktop page, then the algorithms are not evaluating the full page content which clearly is not good.

Google continue to recommend responsive web design for websites as well as using a single URL for both desktop and mobile websites (i.e. rather than having a separate mobile site).

Google announced that mobile-first indexing will be enabled by default for all new, previously unknown to Google Search, websites starting from the 1st July 2019. Roll out for the whole web commenced in September 2020.

To start with, for older, existing websites, Google monitored and evaluated pages for their readiness for mobile first indexing, and notified the site administrators via Google Search Console once they’re seen as being ready but most sites have now been moved over to mobile indexing now.

So, is your website mobile friendly and responsive ? Don’t know ?

Give us a call and we can check it for you and advise you on how best to resolve the problem.