Google will be marking sites as mobile ready on mobile and tablet devices in search results beginning April 23, 2015.
If you’re website isn’t mobile friendly, it will not receive the “Mobile-friendly” moniker on mobile and tablet devices.
This is what it looks like:
What does this mean for me?
Updating your site to a responsive design should no longer be on the long-term strategy. It should be part of the now strategy.
Check your website analytics reports to see how much traffic comes to your site via mobile devices, including tablets. If you are seeing this number increase over a period of 12 months, the trend will only rise. Contact your site administrator and ask about the site’s responsive design.
Testing Your Site
Conduct some due diligence tests to make sure your site is ready. Here are some tests Google has offered.
- Check your pages with the Mobile-Friendly Test.
- Read our updated documentation on our Webmasters Mobile Guide on how to create and improve your mobile site.
- See the Mobile usability report in Google Webmaster Tools, which highlights major mobile usability issues across your entire site, not just one page.
- Check our how-to guide for third-party software like WordPress™ or Joomla™, in order to migrate your website hosted on a CMS (Content Management System) to use a mobile-friendly template.
Google writes that webpages are eligible for the “mobile-friendly” label if they meet the following criteria:
- Avoids software that is not common on mobile devices, like Flash;
- Uses text that is readable without zooming;
- Sizes content to the screen so users don’t have to scroll horizontally or zoom; and
- Places links far enough apart so that the correct one can be easily tapped.
The above four requirements are detected by Googlebot. If you want to see whether your site is eligible for the label, you can check your pages with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test by dropping in URLs and hitting the blue Analyze button.
