I was looking at my site on Saturday night and I noticed my Alexa rank. Even though most people think there’s no use for Alexa, it turns out there is. and it scared me. I noticed that my traffic had dropped drastically and I wanted to see what the issue might be.
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I looked at my Google Analytics and noticed that for every single one of my websites my traffic had dropped drastically around the beginning of May. I thought that was strange and I wasn’t sure why that was happening so I did some research.
It turns out that at the beginning of May is when Google decided to look at web sites and determine whether they were mobile friendly or not, which I thought I was totally prepared for. I had gone through a lot of work to make sure that all my websites were mobile friendly, and I had even checked them against this Google page that indicated that all my sites were mobile friendly. So what was the issue?
It seems mobile friendly isn’t the only thing to worry about. The other thing we have to worry about is mobile speed. I hadn’t paid that much attention to mobile speed because all everyone ever talked about was being mobile friendly. When I checked all my sites against mobile speed, even though they all still came up mobile-friendly, my mobile speed was around 60/100. It turns out that’s considered a poor mobile website; who knew?
I’m one of those people who is at least a little bit tech savvy. I’m also a pretty good researcher, so I did my thing and started doing all this research, then started finagling with code to try to get the mobile speed up to par. The problem was associated with compression, though initially I thought it might be a problem with image sizes. However, since my blogs won’t accept large files, I didn’t think it was that particular issue. It was associated with something called “gzip compression”; I don’t fully understand it but it didn’t mean I was scared to try to correct the problem.
At one point I actually succeeded in getting my mobile speed to 100/100, and thought that was pretty fantastic. However, two things happened. The first is that my mobile friendly went down from 100/100 to 72/100, which is only considered fair. The second is that all my websites suddenly had internal server errors; that wasn’t good.
I had to go back and remove all the new code that I had added to both php.ini and .htaccess to get my websites back; whew! Once that was accomplished, I dabbled around with the code for a longer period of time, finding more examples during my search including on the 1&1 site, which is where I host my sites.
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After almost 3 hours I decided it was time to call 1&1 to see what they might offer. The recommendation that was on their site was from 2014, so I thought maybe it was out of date.
I spoke to the lady who told me she would send me a code I should add to .htaccess. When I got the code in the email it was the same code I had already tried. I wrote her back saying it didn’t work, gave her a screenshot of the Google test as well as other information that I had in both php.ini and .htaccess. After I hadn’t heard from them in a couple of hours I decided to go to bed (it was close to 2:30 in the morning after all lol).
Sunday morning I checked email and found that the reason none of what I was doing would work was because I was on a package that was 10 years old and they hadn’t just rolled it over, which seems like it would make sense until I realize that neither the phone companies or cable companies would do it automatically either. In essence, nothing I was doing was compatible with what everyone else might have because I’ve been with the same package for too long.
Sunday afternoon I finally made the call to 1&1 and, after having all my questions answered, I decided to upgrade my package. Here’s the funny thing though. Upgrading my package is costing me $0.13 more a month. Also, for the first year I’m getting it at $6 less than what it would normally cost, and they have to give me a prorated discount because they had just taken a payment against my credit card last week so they have to apply that to the new package. In essence, this means for the first year I will be paying them just under $50, and after that it will be $14.99 a month, which they’ll bill in one shot as opposed to the quarterly billing I’ve been paying. Not only that, but with the new package I won’t be paying $5.99 for extended PHP support, which I was paying because my sites weren’t compatible with the latest PHP under the old package; sigh…
Supposedly it’s going to take 3 to 5 days for everything to be working properly. After that time, it’s my expectation that I should at least be close to 100/100 for everything since compression will automatically be on via the hosting company. Hopefully this will result in a turnaround in my stats, although since it took 4 months for it to fall this far it just might take the same amount of time to get it all back… but I’m hopeful.
I tell this tale because I’m betting that some of you have been going through some of the same things I have. If you have exhausted all of your options and you’re still having issues with your website as it applies to being mobile friendly, you should check with your host to find out if your on a proper package that will help you take care of this issue. If only I had known back in May… sigh…
What a joke, as if it wasn’t bad enough trying to increase the normal speed (desktop) now we have to worry about mobile speed as well.
I checked three of my sites with the following result.
Wassup was 56, my sports betting site was 60 and my first blog was 66. All blogs use the same theme but the one with the best score has the least amount of plugins and images.
The funny thing is in the past when trying to speed up my blogs one of the things that was slowing it down was Google ads lol
Isn’t it something? I’m glad I checked with the hosting package. I was initially irked, then realized that both the phone company and cable folks do the same thing. Heck, even my car insurance had done that to my wife and I.
As for those Google ads… those things were locking my system up because I hadn’t known that Google had changed the coding of ads and that we were supposed to update them. Coulda told somebody! lol
Yeah, and you think them being so hooked on speed and all that their ads would be more speed responsive wouldn’t you?
Actually, they are. It just requires us to go in and change the codes that they changed things to without telling us. I did that for my medical billing site; took some time but it worked out.
Hi Mitch,
I have to confess that this is an issue I had never considered. My site speed is pretty good, but I never thought to look specifically at the mobile speed.
I make my blog and all my other sites mobile friendly, now you’ve given me something else to consider.
So, thanks for keeping me on my toes 🙂
-Donna
Thanks Donna. I tell you, it was quite the shock and disappointment seeing how things were dragging on my site when the one Google page said I was mobile friendly. Now that I’ve increased the speed to at least the fair level, I hope it translate into getting some of the traffic back that I’ve been losing.
Wow, this is informative. I have spent considerable time, and not an insignificant amount of money, getting mobile friendly…
I’m going to have to look into this speed issue. Ugh! Can I hire you? LOL
Cheers,
Mitch
Heck Mitch, at some point I’m going to add a few more things I’ve been doing over the course of this week that are fairly simple and will help at least a little bit. Course you know me, a little bit just isn’t going to do but at least it’s an improvement over where I’ve been.
Well, if that’s the case a heads up would have been nice.
That’s true… except not only did I write about it in 2015, but you commented on it so you at least knew then lol http://www.imjustsharing.com/trying-to-become-mobile-friendly-isnt-a-friendly-process/
Aw, c’mon Mitch, that was over a year ago. lol
How do you remember that stuff? 😉
You know me; it’s what I do 😉
I consider webpage load times THE most important thing, especially above the fold content. Google’s PageSpeed insights tool is a nice direction to start in, but doesn’t actually tell you how long your website took to load, only a little advice on how to make it better. Don’t dwell on your score out of 100, I wouldn’t call it relevant. Instead use Pingdom Tools to see how long, for real, your website is taking to load and how many HTTP requests your website is sending.
Hi Joan; welcome! I went to Pingdom Tools and ran a test. The problem is that a lot of that stuff is hard to understand, or figure out what to do. For instance, “Serve static content from a cookieless domain”; I didn’t even know I had cookies turned on from the blog, let alone know how to figure out how to make it cookieless lol “Minimize redirects”, “Combine external JavaScript”… no clue. Even there, they send you to the Google developers to look for answers, and I’m already there & struggle to figure out what they’re saying also. I don’t consider myself a dumb guy, but all of this is making my head spin! 🙂
Yeah, I am agreed with this discussion actually Google become very smart nowadays and it wanted to help their customers in many ways. This mobile-friendly and mobile speed consideration has also belonged to that era which is started by Google many days back.
And a small question I would love if you answer it?
Does how much speed should a website need in a number to rank better.
Cheers!
Google has stated that since they consider mobile more important than desktop that speed is a big determinant in how they rank sites these days. Concentrate on making sure your main page is in the fast area, between 90-100 because your article pages might not get there most of the time. That’s because the search engines look at them differently than the main page for some reason.
Maintaining 90-100 mobiles speed is a bit hard for HTML and Javascript used websites. Anyways shifting to WordPress is the better way to keep a website fast compared to former
Thank you, Mitch,
That’s true, as well as too much blocking code. I had to work hard to get that fixed on my regular sites.