“Is My Website Mobile-Friendly?” Checklist
So you’re living in the aftermath of Mobilegeddon. “Make sure your website is mobile-friendly!” Well, what exactly does that mean? Is my website mobile-friendly? In order to help you answer these questions and make sure you get search engine priority ranking over your competitors, we’ve made a checklist of questions that need to be answered to make sure your website is ready for mobile search.
✓ Have you run Google’s mobile-friendly test?
Google has a mobile-friendly test that is extremely easy to use. Click this link, then just enter your URL and it’ll give you some pointers on what needs to be fixed. It will tell you whether or not your website is mobile-friendly according to their official standards.
✓ When you search for your business on a smartphone does it say “mobile-friendly” next to the result?
On your smartphone, if you Google “Envoc Think Blog” the first result will be our own blog. Right under to it are the words “mobile-friendly.” Google did this in order to let their users know which sites are optimized for their mobile phones to enhance their user experience.
✓ Is your text too small to read?
When you open your website on a mobile device, do you have to pinch and squeeze to read the content on your site? If so, it’s way too small for your clients to read. Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test will tell you if your website needs legible font sizes.
✓ Are your links hard to click?
You can tell how mobile-friendly your site is based off of the links. Non-responsive and non-mobile-friendly websites have links that are difficult to click when going to the site. You can tell by seeing overlapping buttons or links that are too small for your fingers to tap. Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test will also tell you if links are too close together for accurate tapping.
✓ Is the content wider than the screen on your mobile device?
When browsing your website, do you find yourself having to scroll left or right to finish reading a sentence? This happens because most of your design is responsive, but not the viewable area, or viewpoint for your content.
✓ Are your images mobile optimized for mobile devices?
In the same way that your content can be wider than the screen, your images can stretch beyond what your screen shows, or load slowly due to large file sizes. If your images continue on to the left or right of your screen or take too long to load, they aren’t mobile optimized.
✓ Is your website an m. site?
You can tell if it’s an m. site by going to your website on your smartphone or typing in m.yourdomain.com and seeing if your sitegets pulled up. If the answer is yes, then your website is technically mobile-optimized. However, there are some downfalls to using an m. domain. If you have an “m dot” site, your content can lose sharability, have spread-out SEO rankings, and can have redirect lag.
✓ Does your page have resources blocked by Google’s robots.txt?
The robots.txt is a robot exclusion standard and allows your website to be found by and communicate with web crawlers and web robots. When running the Mobile-Friendly test, Google will alert you if any resources are blocked. If portions of your site are blocked, they will be excluded in the bot crawl of your site affecting Google’s ability to fully index your website.
✓ In Google’s PageSpeed Insights, how does your website rank for Speed on Mobile?
Google has its own PageSpeed Insights, a tool that’s used to test the speed of your website. While speed isn’t a factor in search rankings, a faster website means a better overall experience for your clients/customers. These speed checks are based off of Google’s Best Practices.
Note: Your Speed score depends on the current speed of your host servers, so it may vary day-to-day, but not immensely.
✓ In Google’s PageSpeed Insights, how does your website rank for User Experience on Mobile?
On Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool there is a section that ranks the User Experience of your website on Mobile and Desktop. This score tells you how easy your website is to navigate. User Experience tests are based off of Google’s Best Practices.
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Print out a downloadable checklist
We'd be more than happy to discuss the websites we've built and walkthrough this checklist with you step-by-step. If you have any questions, please email [email protected].