It has been heading this way for quite sometime and with Google’s date of the 21st April looming – the dilemma is – just how (mobile) friendly does a site need to be?

We can’t ignore the fact that websites are being accessed increasingly through mobile devices (smartphones and tablets). Depending on where you look, statistics have around 58% of adults accessing the internet via a mobile device. And good old Google has being paying close attention – so from April 21st 2015 – they will take into account just how mobile friendly a website is.

In a Nutshell … If a user is on a mobile device, the most relevant content that is optimised for their device will now be the easiest to the find.

If you want to be amongst these websites – then this date is important. But good news … businesses do not need to make their sites 100% mobile friendly by this date – but it is definitely worthwhile concentrating on those pages that receive the most mobile visitors.

Here is a little checklist of what to look out for:

• Do your fonts scale for easy reading on smaller screens
• Are the touch elements (i.e. buttons) easy to use and not tightly packed
• Does your site contain any Flash items – Google’s crawler must be allowed to crawl CSS & JavaScript
• Separate mobile URLs? You need to redirect mobile users of each desktop URL to the appropriate mobile URL
• Do not use irrelevant cross-links – Linking to desktop-optimised pages from the mobile website, and vice versa
• Slow mobile pages and load time – either from a slow server or overloaded pages (non-optimised images or code)

Email HWB Design to discuss:
How we can help your website with these changes.

Good reading resources:

googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk – finding more mobile friendly search
journalism.co.uk – google’s algorithm update on 21st april 2015 aims to elevate the importance of responsive web design
searchenginewatch.com – mobile optimization and the google algorithm change 7-steps to stay friendly
t324.com – google announces plans to penalise sites not optimised for smartphones