How do I Check if my Website is Mobile Friendly?

byboomergp08

31.2K followers

Updated 10 years ago

You've probably been hearing the rumors for a couple of weeks now and are asking yourself, how do I check if my website is mobile friendly? This has been a hot question by many, seeing how on April 21, 2015, websites that are not compatible are going to take a hit in the Google rankings.

That is the date that Google’s ranking algorithm is changing to accommodate the mobile market, which more people use to search the internet than desktop/laptop computers. Many of the things being compatible with mobile, has been in the works now ever since January, when mobile usage surpassed computer usage.

ARE YOU READY FOR APRIL 21, 2015?

I know the majority of you are very keen to what SEO and rankings mean to the amount of traffic your website receives, and thus the amount of customers too. I’m sure some of you may be stressing out about this, but let me set some of those fears to rest.

Fortunately many of us here at Wealthy Affiliate will be OK, especially if we built our websites well without misaligned images and links too close to one another. Another thing to ease your fears is that many of the WordPress themes are “responsive” themes, meaning that they can easily adapt to different screen sizes.

BUT HOW CAN I BE SURE?

There are 3 things you can do. FIRST: You can go into the Google Webmaster Tools area for your website and in the left side menu, click on “Search Traffic” -> “Mobile Usability” (as seen above) and this will tell you if your website is OK or there are problems. If there are problems it will tell you what they are and what pages/posts they are on.

SECOND: You will also want to TEST ALL OF THE PAGES AND POSTS ON YOUR WEBSITE, including your home page. You can do that by using the Mobile-Friendly Test tool offered by Google. After entering the page or post you want the testing tool to analyze, it will let you know if the page is Mobile-Friendly or not. It will then show an example (as seen below).

THIRD: You can not only read the Details section of your theme template on the WordPress website to see if it says either “mobile compatible” or “responsive” but you can also manually navigate through your website on a smartphone to see how the user experience is.

THE DEADLINE IS FAST APPROACHING

April 21, 2015 is a little more than a month away. So if you are wondering, how do I check if my website is Mobile Friendly, well now you know a couple of ways to check. So make sure you do these checks now, so if there is a problem you will have time to make adjustments.

NOTE: IT IS IMPORTANT THAT YOU TEST ALL PAGES AND POSTS! Even if your theme is good to go, you still can have problems from how you created your content. If your text is too small or you have links (touch points on mobile) too close to each other, these will make your page or post fail.

For the most of you WordPress users, I feel the problems will be minor, if at all. Use the Google developers Mobile-Friendly Test link above as well as the “Mobile Usability” link in Google Webmaster Tools. I hope your fears will be put at ease and your websites will be compatible like mine were.