Mobile-First – Is your site mobile friendly?

Some time ago, Google announced that they would start mobile-first indexing. In March 2020 Google announced whole-web mobile indexing, rolling out the following September – now delayed until March, 2021. In 2021, mobile sites will also be assessed on the user experience they offer.

What does this mean for your site?

In short, even if your site receives a lot of desktop traffic, in future, your search rankings will be based on whether your site UX and display are in a mobile-friendly format.

Why?

Google decided to prioritise mobile indexing because more and more searches come from mobile devices – this doesn’t mean they use two indexing methods – mobile-first indexing is now used for all results.

What should I do?

Don’t panic just yet, if your CMS includes responsive design you shouldn’t have too much to worry about, although, it may need a few little tweaks here and there – menus, margins and padding are common issues. However, if you use separate websites for mobiles and desktops, you need to action some changes. Everything on your desktop site needs to be on your mobile site including metadata – things like meta-tags, titles and descriptions etc.

What is Mobile-Friendly?

Mobile devices use a much smaller screen than desktops – your content needs to be small screen friendly – consider font sizes, white space, shorter paragraphs, button and clickable element size and spacing, and use of images.

Are you ready?

Is you site mobile friendly? Not sure? We are offering a FREE Website SEO Audit, which includes a usability checker. If you need any help – get in touch.