Uptime.com Blog

Is Your Website Mobile-Friendly? How to Check

Not only is mobile-friendliness a key factor in enhancing your site visitors’ user-experience, but it is also now a significant factor used by Google to rank your site. In order to optimize your mobile site’s performance, first determine whether or not your website is mobile-friendly.

Testing to Determine Mobile-Friendliness

Google offers an easy-to-use tool that allows you to quickly and easily determine whether your website is mobile friendly.

Simply click on Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test, enter your web page URL, and hit “Analyze.” Once Google analyzes the page, it may give you a message that states, “Awesome! This page is mobile-friendly.” Or it will state, “Not mobile-friendly,” and give you a list of reasons for this result.

Please note that this tool checks by page and not domain. So it is important that you plug in each web page to ensure accurate results.

Common Reasons Why Your Site is Not Mobile-Friendly

Google takes into account a number of criteria to determine mobile-friendliness. The following are common problems:

• The user must scroll side-to-side in order to read the page because the site content is too wide for the screen.
• The text on the screen is too small, causing the user to zoom-in in order to read it.
• The links on the screen are too small and/or too close together for the user to easily tap on them.
• The mobile viewport does not automatically adjust based on the device being used, causing the width of the page to be off.
• Your site uses software that is not common on mobile, such as Flash.

How Can You Improve Your Site’s Mobile Friendliness?

There are several factors that can be incorporated to optimize your site and improve its mobile-friendliness.

• Utilize responsive web design, or RWD, which automatically detects the site visitor’s screen size and adjusts the page layout accordingly.
• Avoid blocking the following assets: JavaScript, CSS and image files.
• Do not include videos or content inaccessible through mobile, such as Flash.
• Avoid faulty redirects that point a mobile page to the wrong equivalent desktop page.
• Avoid mobile-only 404 pages. If a page loads properly on your desktop site, its equivalent page should also load correctly on the mobile site.
• If you use a separate mobile site, do not cross-link between your mobile site and your desktop site. Be sure to link mobile pages to mobile pages, and desktop URLs to desktop URLs.
• Ensure that your mobile site is running an optimal speed.

Michael Esposito