Mobile Optimisation: Is your website ready?
What Is Mobilegeddon?
As leaders in IT services we’re keen on all news in the tech industry, and this one struck us particularly interesting. On the 21st April 2015 Google is changing its search results and deciding whether your website is ‘mobile ready’, if your website is not mobile ready you will then get dropped from the website search rankings. General searches on Google from mobile devices will no longer yield the most popular organic results, instead the most popular mobile-friendly websites will appear in ranked order. If you are not sure what ‘mobile ready’ means, it is if you have to pinch or zoom in whilst you are on your website, or if the links to other pages are too close together, unplayable videos, faulty redirects, app download Interstitials. If this applies to you then your website is not mobile ready. I highly recommend you to do an audit of your own site to see if any of these common mistakes apply to you.
A quicker and easier way to tell if your website is mobile-friendly, is to go to the mobile-friendly test page – https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/
This link will lead you to a page where you can enter your webpage/URL and it will tell you if you meet the criteria, if not it will then tell you what changes need to be made.
How Do I Make My Website Mobile Friendly?
- Back up your site before making any changes or updates.
- Update your CMS to the latest version.
- If the CMS offers custom themes, make sure they’re mobile-friendly
- Review support forums for your CMS to see what issues people might be having with the mobile versions of their sites.
If your website is not mobile friendly and requires you to pinch and zoom in to read the content, it’s more likely people will abandon the website, as it is a frustrating experience.
65% access the Internet every day on their smartphone in the United Kingdom and 80% never leave home without it. Interestingly, 77% of mobile searches occur at home or at work, places where desktop computers are likely to be present. This is why it is very important that your website is mobile friendly, so your audience are attracted to your website and have a good experience on your site when they’re visiting from their mobile devices!
Design your site to help make it easier for your customer to complete their most common tasks: from task conception, to visiting your site, to task completion. It’s always best to make it easy for your visitors and help them complete their objectives. They may want to be entertained by blog posts, accessing your contact details easily or even checking reviews on your products.
Appearance wise, your mobile device website should always look similar to your desktop website. Such as your theme, the pages use the same URL and the same code whether it is a desktop, tablet or a mobile phone. When you have a mobile site it always requires prioritisation, you should always start by working out what the most important and common tasks are for your customers on a mobile device.
The Process Of Creating A Mobile Device Website Include…
- Firstly find out whether your page is mobile friendly by taking Google’s mobile friendly test
- Make your site mobile friendly with 3rd party software such as…
- WordPress
- Joomla!
- Blogger
- Drupal
- Google sites
- Magento
- Tumblr
- vBulletin
- DataLife Engine
- Prestashop
- Bitrix
Once you have made it mobile friendly, dive into the technical details. If it helps you can work with someone to make the site mobile friendly (a developer).
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