Google "Mobilegeddon" is here, will you survive?
Starting on April 21, your website may disappear from mobile search results conducted via Google if it is not mobile friendly. The good news is that your rankings on desktop computer searches are most likely safe. However, you may be surprised to learn that the number of Google searches conducted on mobile devices recently surpassed the number conducted on desktop computers. Did I mention this change is a big deal?
This makes sense. As more and more people use Google from their phones to find content, Google will give priority to websites, apps, videos and other indexed resources that are optimized for a good mobile experience. Why serve up an ancient site that doesn’t respond to mobile devices or loads extraordinarily slowly?
How can you survive Mobilegeddon?
Step 1: Check to see if your site is mobile friendly using Google’s Mobile Friendly Test.
Go to Google’s Mobile Friendly test and type in your website’s web address and click the blue Analyze button. While not 100% reliable and may give false positives, this is a quick way to see if you have to take action.
If your site passed, skip to Steps 3and 4below. If your site failed, go on to Step 2.
Step 2: Reprogram your site using responsive programming.
If you follow the Red Sage blog, we talk about this ad nauseum. Check out Teresa’s “Responsive Web Design” blog or my last blog titled “How long will my website last?” Or, give us a call, we can build you a responsive website.
Step 3: Reduce the size of your website files.
Optimize anything you can on your site to reduce file size so your pages load faster on mobile devices. This means optimizing and reducing file sizes on all of your images, css files, javascript files, etc. What is very intriguing is that it looks like Google may soon provide tools that help developers like us do this easily. Currently, there is no fast way to do this optimizing.
Step 4: Turn off unnecessary content on mobile devices.
Go through your website and decide what is important to show on mobile devices, turning off anything not necessary that could slow down the performance of your website. You can see this approach in action on a site we just launched for Tara Liners, an awesome pool liner company. The first screenshot below shows the website on a desktop browser. The image rotator can be seen. In the second screenshot, the image rotator does not appear. This significantly improved load time for this website on mobile devices.
Step 5: Call Red Sage!
We’d love to help you escape the wrath of Mobilegeddon and make sure your website doesn’t disappear from Google search results on mobile devices.