Mobile friendly web design is now essential. There’s a good chance your website is viewed on a mobile device more often than on desktop. More than half of all online internet traffic comes from mobile devices like phones, tablets and iPads. If your website isn’t mobile friendly, you’re losing money. You could even be damaging your brand reputation.
It makes sense to make responsive design a top priority. So, how do you know if your website is responsive or not? And how do you check how it looks on every type of mobile device?
It might be a simple fix to correct an error such as the website text being too small on mobile. In some cases you’ll need to completely redesign your website to update it to today’s standards. The first step is to determine if your current site is mobile-friendly.
How to Use Google’s “Mobile-Friendly” Test
The number one tool that I recommend to check the responsiveness of your website is made by Google. Go to the mobile-friendly test provided by Google and enter your websites URL.
Click “Analyze” and wait for your website to be analyzed by Google. Google is testing to see how your website will show up on mobile devices. The results will not only give you insight into how your website is performing, but how to make improvements.
If your website passes the test, you will see a green message that says, “Awesome! This page is mobile-friendly”.. If it does not pass, the message will be red and say, “Not mobile-friendly.”
In the event that your website does not pass the mobile test, it will also give you the reasons why it failed such as the content is wider than the screen or links are too close together.
If the tool says “no” then the page will be pushed down in the mobile search results in favor of similar pages from other sites that are mobile friendly. Google is checking on several different things to determine whether or not your website is mobile friendly. Here are some common reasons websites fail the mobile test:
- Text is too small to read
- Mobile viewport is not set
- Content is wider than the screen
- Links are too close together
Once you have this information you can either make the adjustments yourself or hire someone to help you. For each error message you will find documentation explain how to fix the issue.
The second tool I highly recommend is the PageSpeed Insights by Google. This tool has been around for a while now, and although it’s not only for testing mobile websites, it comes in handy especially for that.
When you analyze your website in PageSpeed Insights, it will tell you A LOT of information. It will show screenshots of how it looks on mobile and desktop as well as give you speed scores for both mobile and desktop as well.
In addition to speed scores, it gives detailed information about what you should fix, what you should consider fixing, and the things you’ve already done correctly.
