Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you are no doubt aware of the warnings covered across the blogosphere and in my recent post Google Changes Signal the Imperative for Responsive Web Design which provided information about the upcoming changes to Google search results rankings that will favor mobile-friendly Websites.
Perhaps you’ve checked your statistics and mobile traffic to your site is very low, therefore, you assume the Google ranking changes won’t matter. However, consider that Mobile is the new primetime. Time spent on mobile eclipses TV already so you can bet those numbers will rise over time. So why not prepare now rather than rushing to catch-up at the last-minute and risk losing potential visitors to your site in the interim to someone else?
Check out the following sites for measuring and improving your Website’s mobile-friendliness level.
- Mobile Friendly Test page lets you plug-in your site’s URL and get a quick mobile friendly or not mobile friendly rating, followed by suggestions on how to improve your rating if it is deemed non mobile friendly.
- W3C mobileOK Checker provides an overall “failures per severity” report on your URL followed by a detailed description report with links to suggested best practices for improvement.
- HubSpots’s Marketing Grader site gives your site an instant numerical rating out of 100 on several key areas including mobile.
Finally, a few best practices tips for site design include:
- Avoid software not common on mobile, such as Flash
- Use text that is readable without having to zoom
- Space links far apart for ease of tapping
- Size page content to the screen so users don’t have to scroll horizontally
Now, you are either armed with some effective mobile optimization tools and tips or you are among the fortunate and your website is already perfectly optimized for mobile!
