In 2015, in the wake of rising searches on mobile devices and the slow undertake of companies to make their sites “mobile-friendly”, Google released an update on April 21, 2015, that was nicknamed “Mobilegeddon”.
This prioritised sites that were mobile first optimised and were the first real shift into Google realising they had to act fast on the closing gap between mobile and desktop searches. However, this only affected desktop searches and didn’t seem to have the impact that was feared on rankings, and hence conversion. It is crucial to manage content for both desktop and mobile versions of a website to prevent duplicate content issues. Proper implementation of canonical and alternate link elements, along with best practices for separate URLs, enhances indexing and SEO effectiveness across both site versions.
In late 2017, Google took Mobilegeddon one step further and started rolling out a mobile-first algorithm, which was tested on many sites before being finally fully out in 2019.
What Is Mobile-First Indexing?
Mobile-first indexing simply means your website will be judged on how it looks on a mobile-first before a desktop. This is both on mobile and desktop searches, regardless of the device searched from. It is crucial to ensure that both mobile and desktop versions of your website maintain equivalent content and usability to avoid discrepancies that can impact user experience and SEO rankings. The change had the biggest effect on web developers and designers, who suddenly started to prioritise on how sites looked on a variety of sites, rather than this just being an afterthought.
How Can I Tell If My Site Is Mobile-First Optimised for Mobile Users
Mobile Friendly Website
The first way to check is to use Google’s mobile-friendly tool. Simply put in your URL and Google will advise whether your site is mobile friendly. In today’s mobile-centric landscape, having a mobile-friendly website is essential for businesses to remain competitive. However, this will only tell you that your site can be viewed on a mobile; even if your site passed, there are still considerations to look at.
Page Speed
It was once widely accepted that you had 7 seconds to grab the attention of a web user before they got bored or frustrated and went to another website. In the day of mobile searching, this has now dropped to a maximum of 3 seconds. Mobile optimization is critically important for enhancing user experience and search engine rankings. Again Google has launched a nifty tool that will tell you how page speed could be an issue. You won’t get an actual number of seconds the site took to load but you do a get a percentage score for both mobile and desktop versions your site.
Content Above The Fold on Mobile Devices
“Above the fold” content means that users don’t have to scroll down to see it. Mobile search results play a crucial role in enhancing visibility and traffic for websites, particularly through the use of AMP pages and structured data. Google has advised that above the fold content should load quickly (within 1 second!). Why? let’s let Google explain
“Prioritizing above-the-fold content
Research shows that users’ flow is interrupted if pages take longer than one second to load. To deliver the best experience and keep the visitor engaged, our guidelines focus on rendering some content, known as the above-the-fold content, to users in one second (or less!) while the rest of the page continues to load and render in the background. The above-the-fold HTML, CSS, and JS is known as the critical rendering path.”
Google is saying, we want this important text to appear instantly, as in our research it frustrates users, when they can’t see the content to validate this is the right site to their web query instantly.
Reducing Plugins, JSS/CSS loads
Whilst I consider myself to love a good WordPress plugin, the code and scripts they can churn out can see your website’s initial load slow down considerably. Optimizing the mobile site by adhering to various best practices, such as ensuring image and video quality, maintaining consistency in alt text, and managing access via robots.txt, is crucial.
According to a post by Tom at Online Media Masters, the plugins that involve a lot of scans, email notifications, collect statistics and are just overly feature heavy, can heavily affect page load times. He lists 65 of the most labour intensive plugins too.
Minifying CSS/JSS
As above certain plugins or enhancements to your site can come at a price, with loads of unneeded code and files.
“Minification refers to the process of removing unnecessary or redundant data without affecting how the resource is processed by the browser – e.g. code comments and formatting, removing unused code, using shorter variable and function names, and so on.”
It is crucial to optimize mobile sites in the context of Google’s mobile-first indexing, as Google primarily crawls and indexes the mobile version of web content. Best practices for optimising mobile sites ensure a better user experience and improved ranking in search results.
Again, in basic terms minification means stripping out a lot of the unwanted and unneeded code in scripts, so the crawlers aren’t spending so much time reading it and increasing that valuable page speed time. I use WP Super Minify for client’s sites (just a word of warning though, always check with your web developer or web designer before installing plugins. Even the most secure and robust plugins, can have strange effects on your site.)
These are just a few of the many tips, to help optimise your site to be mobile-first optimised. In my experience, I am still seeing many sites with poorly optimised scores ranking well and the pay off in terms of ranking improvements may be minor. However, this may change in the future and we may see Google weighting how mobile-first optimised your site is as a bigger ranking signal.
