You Ask, I Answer: How To Check Mobile Friendly Website?

In today's episode, Sasha asks, How do you check if your website is mobile friendly? Really good question. Uh super important to be doing these days because pretty much every website should be mobile friendly. And there's four different ways to check. They're all free, all easy to use.

Um you just have to interpret the results. So the first way, let's uh go ahead and move things over here. The first one is Google's mobile friendly test. This is part of Search Console, but it's a standalone tool. And you put in a website URL here.

So let's go ahead and do that. And what the tool will do is it will go and get the page that the single URL that you've uh put in, and it's going to check it for all the basics. This is a good tool if you need to check a specific page. Um it's not as good if you have to check an entire website because let's face it, who wants to sit there and type in a whole bunch of URLs. However, for specific pages, especially if you're gonna roll out something like uh a landing page for a campaign, really important tool.

You want to make sure that the landing page is uh friendly on on mobile devices, especially if you are expecting that landing page to rank uh in search. Uh here we see uh my homepage is considered mobile friendly, right? It gives you green if it's mobile friendly, and then if it's not, it will give you a bunch of warnings and tell you what's wrong. So that's way number one. Way number two is in Google Search Console, which if you don't already use, now would be a time to start using it.

There's two different things in Search Console that will help us understand mobile friendliness. The first is the mobile usability test down here. And this looks at your site, and then it will highlight uh pages where uh it thinks it you you just haven't uh passed the test. Uh and you can also see the pages that are are valid, the pages that are are working well. And if something is wrong, it will tell you down here what these things are like clickable elements too close together, uh content wider than the screen, those are things that you would want to fix.

And then if you click on it, you can uh dig into uh if there were errors here, you would be able to dig in and find out okay, what are the pages that are having this problem? So super useful. This is good for site wide. Um when you've got a big website, uh like if you have one page on your website, the other test is fine. This is for if you've got a lot of pages like a blog, you've got landing pages.

Um this is critical if you are to be using the domain version of uh Search Console, especially if you have subdomains. So a lot of folks have things like marketing automation software and the stuff that sets up its own landing pages and and subscription pages and all that stuff, and that's fine, but you want to run mobile friendliness on those two if you if they uh they are part of your domain. So if you had like marketing.christ pen dot com, you'd want to use Search Console at the domain level so that it could also check your marketing automation software and say, like, hey, this these pages here are not mobile friendly because it does count against you if it's part of your uh if it's a subdomain on your main domain. So that's test number two. Test number three is the core web vitals.

Uh so core web vitals, we've talked a lot about these recently, are these measurements for assessing um how well does your website work for things that will eventually be ranking factors. So let's go ahead in to this report here. And there are not there's nothing been I highlighted either way for my website for my domain. Um if there had been, let's go back here, you would see uh indicators like you know what other what uh URLs uh are working or not working. Let's open up an example here.

So for uh some of the pages on my site, the largest contentful paint uh as long as four seconds. So there's an element on some of the pages of my website that takes too long uh before the the largest element renders. So I might want to look at uh doing optimization of page load time or shrinking files and stuff like that. So the first few tests that we talked about here for testing mobile friendliness, rely on Google and its software to crawl your website and to let you know either at the page level or the domain level that your site is mobile friendly. And that's important.

Like those those are things that for SEO purposes uh especially you need to do. You need to get Google's stamp of approval saying yes, things are working uh and uh things are optimized. But there's one more thing that you should do, and that is let's go to the website here. In Google Chrome, if you go up to the view menu and you choose developer and you choose developer tools, the developer tools will load. And what you'll notice is this a little tiny icon here called the device toolbar.

Let's go ahead and click that and turn that on. And now I can choose different devices to look at my website on. So for example, let's do an iPad. Right? And so it has uh let's make it 75%.

And now I'm simulating, actually touching the screen. So this is what my site looks like on an iPad, okay? Uh let's switch over to a Samsung Galaxy. This is what my website now looks like on a Samsung Galaxy. This check is looking at the user experience from your own perspective, right?

Is this a good experience? Do you is this something that you would be happy to see uh when you plug in your own website, or is this kind of like a uh a not great experience? And based on the devices that you have available here, um just do a few checks. Just you know, just check things out and see like how does this look on a series of devices? Is it good?

Is it bad? If it's not a pleasant experience or if things are not showing up the way you expect them to, this is gonna tell you that. Google's tests will not tell you this. Um they will just check to make sure it it's functionally working. But for example, if I am trying to promote something on my website, is there stuff here that shouldn't be?

Is there stuff that's getting in the way? Like this is my newsletter here, and it's what about a a third of the way down the page. Um, do I want that form moved up? If so, I know I need to reorder the blocks in my design. And so this is the fourth check is using uh Google's Chrome and the device manager to uh do those user experience tests really with an e an expert eye, a human eye, um, towards are things working the way they're supposed to be.

Mobile usability is all about making sure that people can do what you want them to do on a smart device. And if you have not already, go into your Google Analytics and check to see what percentage of your site's web traffic is from a mobile device. If it's more than like three percent or five percent, you want to run these mobile usability checks. For SEO purposes, it doesn't matter what percentage of your site's traffic is is mobile. If you want to rank well in Google's mobile first index and in the mobile first world, you gotta do what Google says.

So those are the four checks. You should run these. One should run anytime you've got a new important page on your website. Search Console, you should be checking Search Console at least once a month. At least ideally, maybe every couple of weeks.

And when you're in Search Console, you know you're not you don't have to do everything, but at least just go in and make sure there's no obvious warnings like things just on fire. Um and then uh for the developer tools uh version, doing the UX check, do that anytime you've got a big design change, uh, and maybe once a quarter. Just again, going in there, making sure somebody hasn't messed up with the website, uh, put something on there that you didn't expect, uh a new maybe tags if you add a new tags or new trackers to the site, uh hopefully via tag manager that hasn't broken those as well. And anytime you make any infrastructure change. So if you, for example, roll out Cloudflare and you use their uh Rocket Loader, uh, which optimizes JavaScript.

If you do that, immediately go test. Go test, go test, go test. Because sometimes things like that will just totally break your site. Uh anytime you add a new plugin in like WordPress, rerun the developer tools test and make sure that things are not broken uh unexpectedly. So, really good question.

Lots of different ways to do this. Um do these, like I said, for in any to the circumstances mentioned. If you've got follow-up questions, leave them in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter. I'll talk to you soon.

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