I’m sure most of you now have websites which display as effectively on mobile devices as they do on desktop PCs. If not, it’s going to be crucial that they do so in the next few months, because Google is going to be crawling everyone’s site as a mobile device in “six to twelve months.” This is because it’s a couple of years since Google announced that more searches were performed on mobile devices than desktops now, and hard luck if that’s not representative of your website’s visitors.
Most sites have already been moved over to this ‘mobile-first’ way of being indexed, but those that have posed difficulties for Google’s evolving crawling strategy have been warned that they have problems and given time to sort things out. Many of us have had (and still get) warnings in Search Console that we have ‘mobile indexing issues’. This has occurred for various obscure reasons even if we have ‘responsive’ sites, where we assumed exactly the same content was served up to every device, with only the layout changing.
I doubt any of this will be a problem for a typical business. One thing however that we should all keep an eye on is the response time on mobile devices. There are many online testing tools – I quite like Uptrends – which can often demonstrate that your site has an unacceptable loading speed. I’ll look at what that might be in the next blog post.