Go right now to this test site by Google, enter your website address, and get a report back on how fast your site delivers pages, both on desktop computer and mobile phones, and on your site’s overall “mobile friendliness”, how it looks and performs on mobile.
What’s the big deal? For all the head scratching and beard pulling on the topic of “what does Google want?” – this is really Google telling you what it wants! So get the report on the test site or in an email version and forward it to your website developer or webmaster with a sobbing-face emoji because Google probably will find something wrong with your site. Heck, we ran Google’s own YouTube site through the test and got a “poor” rating for Mobile Speed.
The report not only ranks your site good, fair or poor on mobile friendliness and speed, but also gives extensive breakdowns on all the factors that make up the score. Any failing factor comes with a link to an article on the Google Developers site describing the fix-it process and linking to tools on GitHub.com or elsewhere to get it done.
Google wants mobile websites to run fast because it doesn’t want users wandering off the web to mobile apps like Facebook’s or Apple’s. It’s made it very clear that it will downgrade the search rankings on mobile for websites that aren’t mobile friendly. As for page speed, search engine experts have long believed that Google ranks desktop websites based on speed, and a Google executive recently told an industry gathering that it would soon do the same for mobile websites.
Anyway, Google’s agenda should be your agenda: Already, more mobile searches happen on phones than on desktop computers and 90% of mobile website visitors leave right away if they can’t see what they’re looking for, says Google. And yet (sobbing face emoji) we still see so many small-business websites that aren’t mobile friendly. Hit the Google test site to see if that’s you.
Our company, Dex Media, builds mobile friendly websites for local businesses. Also, we offer a whole suite of free testing tools to evaluate your website’s quality and effectiveness.
