Quick Check to See If Your Site is Mobile Friendly

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Everyone is talking this week about Google’s threat to change their algorithms to start penalizing sites that are not mobile friendly. I started getting emails to my Webmaster account several months ago about the need to update my sites. Some sites we were already working on but others we were a long way from touching.

If you want to know if your site is mobile friendly, Google will be happy to tell you. Just go to their Mobile-Friendly Test page and put in your site. You will get the response above “Awesome! This page is mobile-friendly.” if you have done a good job. If you haven’t, you will get the response below that details what your problems are and some ideas of how to fix them.

Interestingly, you can actually look on a page by page basis rather than just your entire domain. For example, my site Sunshine Rewards was re-designed to be responsive, but we have not paid to upgrade our Vbulletin forum. So our forum shows up as “Not mobile-friendly” when I run the test on it, even though the rest of the site is fine. It will be interesting to see if Google is really going to change on a page by page basis or rather will penalize the entire domain. (We’re working on it!!)

So what if you have a bunch of old blogs and don’t have the time or money to upgrade them all quickly? One suggestion is to install the WP-Touch plugin. It will make your pages instantly mobile-friendly. I installed in across 3 different blogs in less than 10 minutes. It is not a perfect solution, but it does solve the problem for now until I have time to completely upgrade my themes (I’m switching from Thesis to Genesis).

Once you install WP-Touch or upgrade your theme or whatever and have run it through the Google check to make sure that Google thinks it is okay, it’s a good idea to test some interactions as well. There are some really great Chrome Extensions you can use to bring up your site the way that it would behave on various phones and tables. I like both Mobile/RWD Tester and Responsive Web Design Tester. I am sure that there are a lot of other similar ones.

Are your sites all ready for the big algorithm update? What have you done to upgrade them or what (if anything) are you planning on doing?