Ever since Google and a couple other search engines decided they wanted to rank websites that they consider mobile friendly higher than other sites, people like me have been tearing our hair out trying to figure out how to get there. I can tell you it’s not easy at all.
For those of you who haven’t heard about this or don’t understand what it means, let’s talk about mobile friendly sites for a quick minute.
It seems that more than 55% of all web traffic is now being performed via some type of mobile device. This means smartphones, tablets, readers, etc. It doesn’t mean laptops or notebooks and definitely not desktop computers.
Mobile friendly for the specific items I mentioned means that if someone pulls your website up that it’ll load fast and look like it was designed for a mobile experience since the screens are smaller than what some of us are traditionally used to. Strangely enough, it’s their expectation that the website needs to look good if someone’s looking at it on their phone vertically, which means the long way, rather than horizontally, meaning you’re looking at more physical real estate.
Frankly, I’m a horizontal viewer whenever I need to use my phone to look something up. It’s easier to hold my smartphone in two hands and easier to type that way. I might search for something vertically, but once I pull up a site I always move horizontally because it’s a better viewing experience in my opinion.
Never mind that for now I suppose. Let’s look at trying to get one’s site mobile friendly.
This is the link you can use to find out if your site is mobile friendly or not, courtesy of Google: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/. Go to this site and put in the URL of your website or blog.
If you’re having issues, go to this other link, also courtesy of Google: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights. It will give you insights as to how you might fix whatever your issue might be.
You’ll get some kind of score. If you’re already using something on your blog to make your site mobile friendly (I use WP Touch) then you’ll probably come up as being friendly, although some people say it’s not 100% effective; I’ve done okay so far. If not, the most common issue is the font, in which case you just go into the plugin and select one of the supposedly favored Google fonts and get on with life.
If it’s your website… you’re probably in some kind of trouble. Google will give you a score, then they’ll give you links that you can click on to refine what your issues are and give you a chance to fix them.
I have three static websites, and none of them are compliant. However, by working on some of these things all of them are at least 80% compliant, one of them at 93%. However, there are issues, which I’m going to point out and, maybe, some day someone will be able to help me get around them because so far the advice has been the same but none of the fixes have worked.
Before I go too far, let me tell you that size seems to be the major issue overall, as in how it will look on a smartphone if you’re looking at vertically, as I mentioned above. This is how they begin scoring you; after that it’s speed.
The biggest recommendation I kept getting was to add this code into the header: meta name=viewport content=”width=device-width initial-scale=1″. For every one of my sites, when I put this sucker in and tested the site again my score went down. So, instead of using this I started experimenting with different widths. I tried going larger first but it seems bringing it down in degrees works better. On the site I got to 93% I changed the width to 400; system assumes it’s pixels so I didn’t define it further than that. Eventually I tried taking out the “initial-scale=1” part and there are no difference in score at all.
The next thing is your fonts. For all my sites it kept telling me that the fonts were too small. I kept changing the pixel size, by degrees of course because you don’t want your site looking goofy; they say they don’t want it looking strange either. They recommend making the size 16px; only on the site that I got to 93% did it make a difference; not sure why it didn’t work on the other sites. Still, it’s something to play with.
After that you might have to do something with your logo image if it’s a large one. On two of my sites the logo is larger than 320px. If you try shrinking your logo it looks stupid; trust me on this one. However, the fix that was recommended that raised my score was to not put a “restrictive” size on the image. Instead, make the width 100%; it allows the phones to resize it somewhat… I’ll get back to this point later.
The final thing… do you run Adsense on any of your sites? On the site I’m getting the 93% on, my lingering issue has to do with my Google Adsense code. At first they were griping because I wasn’t using what they call an asynchronous version of their code. Turns out they changed their codes somewhere along the line; totally missed that.
So, I went back and changed the codes on most of my sites. The top code size is 728×90, which is one of the highest converting codes Google’s ever put out, and works well on my site (this is my medical billing site by the way). Guess what… Google hates that size! That’s the last thing it wants me to fix, and it’s their code!
Come on now; that’s just not fair! It’s still a code choice in Adsense, which means their own code isn’t mobile friendly. Thus, they’re going to penalize me and lots of other folks for using their own code; tell me that’s not the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard! Sigh…
Not only that, but when I looked at each of my websites after making the changes… vertically they all look stupid. Horizontally they look a lot better, and one can resize as necessary to read easier, especially with the larger phones.
Thus, my contention that trying to go mobile friendly isn’t a friendly process whatsoever, and Google is a big part of the problem. Trust me, I’ve researched this a lot and most of what I’m seeing either keeps recommending things that don’t work, like what I’ve mentioned above, or talks in riddles with language I just don’t understand. Many recommendations are to totally change your design, with an understanding that a lot of small businesses (me!) might not be able to do it for a while.
My saving grace? On two of my sites I have blogs attached to them that are mobile friendly. So, I shouldn’t take a big hit if I take one at all. The other one… I’m not really worried about it yet, however it’s the one site that just might need a total redesign because I built it in a very complicated way. I like it, but it’s never done what I wanted it to do so if I have the time it just might need some major reworking.
That’s my tale and my sharing… as much as I could. What have you been dealing with, if you’ve bothered to deal with it? I know my buddy Pete changed his sites over to WordPress so he could run the mobile app. I don’t have that luxury unfortunately, as I’m running a couple of scripts that I couldn’t run with that software. Anyway, share your thoughts on all of this; I need a cookie!
Mitch, That was a wonderful tips about mobile friendly discussion.
After Google updated their mobile algorithm on 21th, I found that a lot of bloggers wrote about mobile friendly customizing.
Honestly, you was the unique one because almost of those bloggers are online mentioned about designing, but the important element like you.
Sure, font is really important because whenever readers accessed to blog, the looking for reading…
I love you mentioned about Adsense, it is the most important for blog owner.
Thanks
Thanks Kimsea. I will correct you slightly about Adsense for blogs. As you notice, I don’t have it on this blog. They decided 4 years ago I didn’t deserve to have it here and truthfully, I think I’d made less than $5 in the years I’d had it. It’s very important for some websites though, so them being contrary is disturbing.
Thanks for this wonderful information.. I think it right time for me to re-create my site for mobile friendly due to Google new rule in town.
Good luck with it Olayinka; it’s not easy…
I hate the way that Google keep changing the goal posts Mitch. I guess mobile is the way things are going though. I still do most of my viewing on a desktop but I must be one of the die hards!
I added Adsense back on my blog a few weeks ago. I set it up using their responsive ads to make them mobile friendly. I’ve got it working now but it wasn’t as easy as I’d hoped!
You’d think that if Google are keen to get site owners to do all this stuff, they’d make things easy to implement on the things they own like Adsense.
I’m with you Tim but obviously they’ve got their own ideas, as contradictory as some of them are. I just wish some of the codes I keep seeing actually worked. Guess we’ll see how it all turns out at some point.
So far, I can’t see any impact on new algorithm. All my projects are mobile friendly, actually all my websites are mobile friendly since 2011. I guess Google again throw “misleading” bomb about algorithms. In general process of getting website responsive is quite simple, but there are many things related to JavaScript, compression and CSS implementation that makes it a bit tricky to get Google speed mobile score above 90.
Hey Carl! Yeah, the Javascript/CSS thing is messing with me greatly. Lots of the recommendations I’ve read just don’t work and make my score lower. No idea, and it’s freaking me out. I also don’t seem to be suffering… yet…
As you know Mitch I converted my websites to the WordPress platforms so as to overcome these issues. One of them has a 99/100 user experience. The reason it didn’t get 100% is because of a ‘tap target’ which happens to be a Google Ad! Does that mean their ads aren’t mobile friendly? 😉
I’m happy to get close to the target rather than trying to get 100% compliancy.
Pete, you ran into the same issue I did; Google’s own ad messing stuff up is irksome and stupid because it’s them who recommended giving it a try, and it’s actually worked out pretty well.
I’m not sure I’m ready to go the entire “change website” route just to suit Google; you know how I can be (and you used to be lol). So for now I’m not playing the game. Strangely enough, because of the blog, that site’s been increasing in rank over the last month; go figure.
Quick question, now that PR is defunct how are you gauging the increase in your ranking?
I’m going straight off Alexa and Google Analytics, though Alexa is quicker to check.
I think I’ve found myself to be pretty lucky considering the fact that I do my blogging on Blogger. The platform itself is pretty much already mobile friendly and most of the themes, by Google and third party ones, are mobile friendly as well due to the platform and how Blogger works.
You’re correct on that one Daniel but you know the thing about being self hosted as opposed to using a free service… I’d rather be in control of my content exclusively. 🙂
Well none of us are really in control of our content exclusively, there’s always something or someone trying to control it.
I do know that using Blogger, I’ve granted Google a few things, but I really don’t think Google cares about what I post on my blog if I follow the guidelines of their service. The same thing applies for when using self hosted WP blog, you agree to your web hosts terms to use their service the same way I agree to Google to use their service. 🙂
Actually that’s not quite true. There are lots of folks who’ve had all their content snatched by Blogger, WordPress and Tumblr for whatever violations there are. By self hosting, you always retain access to your content, even if they shut you down for major violations… but those have to be extreme.
Of course, if you’re “me” you know how to get it all back… or if you read this blog, since I told people how to do it some months ago. 🙂
I must be one of the lucky ones then, as I’ve been using Blogger for years now and haven’t had any of my content snatched nor have I ever had my Blogger account (or Google Account) terminated.
I do always save my blog posts in text format though, just as a backup as I would do even with self hosting.
Well, you’re not writing anything close to controversial I’d imagine; at least not in the few posts I looked at. lol Every once in a while I’ve just got to say something about “something”… and the almighty G might not like it. Back some years ago they took away my right to have Adsense on here because of a post I wrote that obviously none of them ever looked at because it was fairly innocuous except for the title. I didn’t care about that but knew that had it been on Blogger they might have shut the entire thing down.
Yeah, Alexa is my favourite these days. It’s not often that I check Google Analytics.