April 10, 2015 | Sarah Sullivan | Digital Strategist

Is Your Website Mobile Friendly? 3 Ways to Check

In our previous post in this series, we discussed the specific factors included in Google’s April 21, 2015 algorithm update for mobile and what impact this change would likely have for mobile search results in general.

The next step is to determine what impact this update could have on your presence in organic mobile search results.

How to Know if Your Website is Mobile Friendly

Use one (or more) of the three options outlined below to test your web pages’ mobile-friendliness. Remember, each page is scored individually as opposed to your entire website, so simply running your homepage through the mobile friendly test won’t provide an accurate picture of the mobile-friendliness of your entire website.

There are three easy ways to test your website for mobile-friendliness:

1) Check the recently-added Mobile Usability report in your Google Webmaster Tools account. Login to Google Webmaster Tools and go to Search Traffic > Mobile Usability to see if any of your pages have errors.

Google Webmaster Tools Mobile Usability Report Screenshot
A view of the Google webmaster tools screen showing the Mobile Usability report.

2) Perform a site search in Google on your mobile phone and note if your web pages come back with Google’s “mobile friendly” label in front of the meta description. To perform a site search, type “site:” followed by your domain in the Google search field. Google will pull all the indexed pages for that domain.

A mobile screenshot of the "site search" function shows that Westwerk's website is mobile friendly.
A mobile screenshot of the “site search” function shows that Westwerk’s website is mobile friendly.

3) Run your web pages through Google’s mobile friendly test.

Your Mobile Test Results Are in – What Now?

If you have a mobile friendly website with no errors, pat yourself on the back and get yourself a cold beverage – you’re set!

If you have a mobile site with a few errors, prioritize your fixes and try to get them resolved prior to April 21 but don’t sweat it too much. Once you get the errors resolved, re-submit the pages for indexing. Because of the “real time” scoring, as soon as the page is re-crawled (and passes) it is indexed.

If you don’t have a mobile-friendly website at all, the next step may be to try to determine how big of an impact this algorithm change could have on your business.

Don’t worry, we’ll have some ideas in our next blog post to help you maintain your mobile search results presence, at least temporarily. 

More and more of your prospective customers are on their mobile devices – you need to be there too! Get all the details on mobile responsiveness in this white paper!

Other Blog Posts in this Series

Post #1: 6 Things You Need to Know About Google’s Mobile Friendly Algorithm

Post #3: No Mobile-Friendly Website? No Problem!

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