April 21st – If your website isn’t mobile friendly, it’ll be punished on Google

Recently, Google announced that there will be a major overhaul to their search algorithm for mobile search results.

Google has announced that as of April 21st, any website that is not mobile-friendly will have a significant drop in search ranking results when a users searches via a mobile or tablet.

A study conduced in 2014 demonstrated that internet usage via a phone or tablet are inclining at a much faster rate than desktop. Google has a long history on providing their users with the best user experience, and by making these forceful changes, they have asked the internet to catch up and optimise for the trend.

If your website is not mobile friendly (or as we call it in the industry: “responsive”), this means that your website will be negatively affected on Google Search listings when searched via a mobile phone – regardless of your SEO efforts. Keep in mind, Google has said that this only applies if the Search is from a mobile device; not from a desktop.

How can I tell if my website is Mobile Friendly?

Google provides fantastic tools to identify how Google’s eyes sees your website, in both page speed and user experience.

See our website’s test here – once the scan is complete, you can also test your website by simply entering it in the URL box provided.

By default, the scan will show you a snapshot of the website’s display on a mobile phone, if you scroll down, you will see a subheading titled User Experience.

If your User Experience score for Mobiles is anything below 90, it will most likely fail the Mobile Friendly Test.

If you’re seeing the warning sign above, it’s time to upgrade your website.

How about Page Speed?

Page speed is also another hugely important factor for your website. Slow page speeds do result in worse search engine ranking scores, especially for Bing. More importantly, a online shop can loose a large amount of business if their pages are not served within 4 seconds or less. Customers like responsive, fast and modern websites – it shows trust, commitment and professionalism.

Testing for page speed is easy. We love to use a free service called Pingdom to conduct one of our many (many) tests.