If you haven’t started doing this yet, creating your website content to be viewed on a smartphone, you better start ASAP. Google is now going to use the mobile version of your content for its indexing, hence the name Mobile-First Indexing.
Prior to 2015 Google only considered the desktop version of your content for indexing and then ranking. This is no longer the case. Now your mobile version will be used for indexing and rank. If your website is not Mobile Friendly, then Google will use your desktop version, but this will be problematic. Why?
YOU MUST PROVIDE A GOOD MOBILE USER EXPERIENCE
If the desktop version of your content does not look and perform well on a smartphone, Google will not rank you high in their search results and will even remove you from the search results of those using a mobile device. As was shown on the previous pages, more people use mobile to surf the web.
So it is extremely important that the mobile version of your content be in compliance with the mobile guidelines for creating a good mobile user experience (UX). In short if your site is optimized for mobile then you will rank better on both mobile and desktop. If not then your rankings will drop in both.
WHAT YOU NEED TO DO
Fortunately for the majority of us here at WA, we are using WordPress, and most if not all WordPress themes are “Responsive Design” which means that they easily adapt to the various screen sizes. Having a Responsive website is a major step towards being Mobile Friendly.
Thankfully WA not only uses WordPress for us to build our websites with, but they offer other features that are essential for us to be more Mobile Friendly. I will explain what these are and how they will help our websites on the next page. But for those not using a Responsive Design, changes will be needed.
Regardless of whether your website is Responsive Design or not, there are still some things you will need to do to make sure that your content looks good on a mobile device. First make sure that you are not using a large image at the beginning of your content. Text should be the first thing people see.
Secondly you want to have very short paragraphs, even shorter than what you are reading here in this tutorial. There needs to be plenty of white space, otherwise mobile users will see a big block of text, get quickly bored, and bounce off of your website. This is a poor user experience.
One of the best ways to see if either of these suggestions are providing a good UX is to view them on the smaller screen of a smartphone. View and navigate your website on a mobile device to see how it looks. If you do not see engaging content first and the paragraphs are too long, change it.
Another quick and easy way to see what your website home page will look like on the different sized screens of a desktop computer, tablet and smartphone is to use the handy WordPress guide as seen in the above image. This can be found at the very bottom left of your website’s customization area.
NEXT UP = How to know if your website is fast enough to be Mobile Friendly.
Reply
I would suggest that you do not hold your breath for the release of my next tutorial. You will turn blue and pass out. lol
Seeing how that information is even new to me, and I have to make sure the notes I took at dinner the other night make sense, it will most likely be a couple weeks before I publish that one.
This is very helpful information. I knew that smartphone use was increasing but I didn't think it was that popular yet.
Tried and True
Elaine
This is why Google now ranks us based on how well our websites perform on the smaller screens of mobile devices.
Maybe I missed this, but you can also see how your web site does
using this Google tool
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
Will give you an idea of mobile and desktop performance
As I stated in the above tutorial, WA already has this Google PageSpeed Insights tool fully intergrated into the Site Manager for each of our websites.
WA members do not need to go to Google to access the testing tool. They only need to go into their SitePlus Details section in Site Manager and can easily test every page and post on their website.
