Is Your Website Mobile Friendly?

Let’s face it – mobile technology is the way people do just about everything anymore. You shop, communicate, run your home, your business, your LIFE – all from your mobile device. There’s an app for everything, and anyone who wants to get ahead in business, let alone the search engine rankings, need to embrace the mobile user. And ever since Google added a penalty for sites that are not mobile friendly back in June 2013, a lot of folks are taking the mobile-friendliness of their sites a lot more seriously. As they should.

After all, after creating the penalty for un-mobile unfriendly sites, Google has now begun to give a rank boost to those who DO have a mobile friendly site. So, one more reason to take mobile friendliness seriously.

Which leads to our question for the week – do you? How seriously are you taking the mobile user’s experience on your site? Is it mobile friendly, or not? And do you know how to tell?

Google has launched a new tool to tell you just how mobile friendly your site is. As with many other analytical tools, you plug in your URL, hit enter, the wheels spin and voila! Within a few seconds, you can get the report telling you whether or not your site is mobile friendly. The tool gives you one of two possible outcomes:

• Awesome! This page is mobile friendly. (Love the little cheer there, Google.)
• Not mobile friendly. (Or very nice, either. Might as well come with a Grumpy Cat meme attached.)

Now, Google may or may not add in some constructive criticism or additional information, regardless of whether you are, yes, mobile friendly, or boo, you’re not. The criticism is aimed at helping you provide a better mobile friendly experience for your visitors. You might be told that you have some issues that need to be addressed, or at least considered for addressing. Or you might not. And it doesn’t seem to depend on anything more than Google’s whim as to whether you do, or whether you don’t.

I recently ran my website through the new Mobile Friendly tool and got an “Awesome!” message, along with a note telling me that I had 4 resources that are blocked by robots.txt. I then got a link to an informative article on how I could go about unblocking those 4 resources. Quite a handy bit of resource, and it gives me something to think about regarding the next updating I do to the site. (Another site I manage passed with another “Awesome!” and only had two resource issues. Then, I realized that the first site is running an older version of WordPress, while the other one has received an update. Perhaps that makes the difference.)

So, if you are taking mobile users seriously, and don’t want a penalty for an un-mobile friendly site, you should probably take a run over to Google’s Mobile Friendly Analysis Tool and plug in your URL. Hopefully, if you have any issues, the Google gods will smile upon you and offer up their friendly and helpful advice. After all, mobile friendliness is nothing to take lightly. Just ask Google.