Why you can no longer afford to have a website that isn’t mobile-friendly.

Users are increasingly visiting your website from a variety of different smartphones, tablets, and other devices– and it only makes sense to accommodate this growing number of visitors. From a usability perspective, having a mobile-friendly website is essential.

Now it makes sense from a search engine ranking perspective as Google are now penalising websites that are not mobile-friendly:

“Starting April 21 2015, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results. Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimized for their devices.”

How do I know if my website is mobile-friendly?

For the past few months, Google have been sending warnings to webmasters who have sites that are not mobile-friendly.

You’ll only receive one of these warnings if you or your website designer have set up Google Webmaster Tools for your website and it isn’t currently mobile-friendly.

To make it easy for you to check, Google have  produced an online tool where you can test your site. All you need to do is enter your URL on this page to find out.

What can I do if my website isn’t mobile-friendly?

First of all, don’t panic! Your websites position in the search engine rankings shouldn’t change for those searching on desktop computers and depending on your business type, the majority of your customers may still be using desktops. However, this is changing at a rapid pace and in some countries, over half of all searches are carried out on mobile devices.

There are a number of things that can be done to make your website mobile-friendly. In some cases, the style sheets of your current website can be changed to create a responsive design which will resize the website depending on the type of device being used. In other cases it will mean rebuilding the entire site using a fully responsive design.