Since 2009, Google has been serious about creating a friendly mobile user experience. They reasoned that smartphone users are a significant and fast growing segment of internet users, and therefore Google want to deliver positive experiences of the web and all webmasters should do the same.
Why make a website mobile-friendly?
Quite simply, users who visit your desktop website also need to be able to easily
read, navigate and find the information they want on your mobile website. As Google says, your mobile website should provide an equally good user experience to mobile and desktop users.
Quick guide to mobile compliance
Below, we’ve listed top things you should consider when moving or optimising for mobile.
A. Select mobile configuration
Google recommends responsive design, however it recognises three different configurations for building mobile sites;
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Responsive design
Dynamic serving
Mobile URLs
B. Customise your website software
Some site owners completely build their own website from scratch, whereas others may use an existing software package from a company like WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla. When using existing website software, the site owner doesn’t build the whole site by creating code, style sheets and scripts, but only provides the content (such as photos, images, and text).
Google already provides substantial amount of guidance for the following platforms;
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WordPress
Joomla
Drupal
Blogger
vBulletin
Tumblr
DataLife Engine
Magento
Prestashop
Bitrix
C. Verify mobile friendliness
Mobile friendliness can be verified using tools provided by Google, such as the mobile friendly test
Some of the common mistakes:
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Blocked JavaScript, CSS and image files
Unplayable content
Faulty redirects
Mobile-only 404s
App download interstitials
Irrelevant cross-links
Slow mobile pages
D. Tell Google
Making sure that Google understands your mobile configuration is essential to how your website will rank in Google. Depending on the mobile solution chosen (responsive, dynamic, and separate urls), varied solutions can be applied in order to ensure Google recognises your website as actually being mobile.
E. Optimise
Optimisation of the mobile site is crucial in order to ensure your business receives maximum benefit and recognition for your effort. One of the most important and overlooked factors of optimisation is mobile page speed.As indicated by Google, page speed is a ranking factor and speed is most important for mobile.
