Responsive Website Design - Google's Making Some Changes

Google recently announced that they would be making some changes to the way they rank websites. Starting next week, they'll favour mobile-friendly sites above fixed-width or un-responsive designs.

Here's a link to their blog post about it.

Now more than ever it's vital that your site plays nicely with mobile. Otherwise you're soon going to start losing out on traffic.

 

 

What Should You Do?

My suggestion for people who are concerned that their site may not be up to the mark is to test their site using Google's tools. They've released a couple of handy services recently:

Google Mobile-Friendly Test

Google's Mobile-Friendly Test is a simple tool which will analyse any page you enter - click here to use it.

If I were you, I'd head over there now and start testing! If you're getting error messages, give me a call on 01947 878108 for a free appraisal. I'll tell you how difficult/time-consuming/costly it'll be to make your site mobile friendly.

If you get a congratulatory message, breath easy - your site will not be penalised. But could it be improved further?

Google PageSpeed Insights

This is a clever tool which will tell you how quickly your page loads. It will also highlight any problems which could be reducing performance. Finally it offers some helpful hints and solutions to the problems. Click here to use it.

Again, all you have to do is enter the URL of the page you want to test and wait a few seconds for the results.

Chances are there will be issues. But don't panic, most things can be sorted out fairly easily. Again, if you're concerned about the performance of your site feel free to give me a call.

 

The Rise of Mobile

Google's changes are all down to the fact that so many of use are now using mobiles to browse the net. Reports suggest that globally more traffic now comes from mobile devices than computers. This means that potentially more than half of your site's visitors are using a small screen device.

While in the UK this is usually an exaggeration, it is definitely a sign of things to come.

If your site's not optimised for mobile, the sooner you act the better.

 

p.s. click here to view the Google PageSpeed Insights for this page :)