Google and the Mobile Friendly Websites

Nowadays people can access websites through mobile devices and desktops (PC, laptops) and as we can see on these statistics, the mobile usage is getting higher. However, mobile devices have different screen sizes than the desktop devices and here the experience and interaction with the website gets important. As we all might know, good user experience design means that the thing we design should be easy to use and easy to understand how to use it. In our case having a website designed for desktop (big screens) it doesn’t mean it will be easy to interact when using a smartphone (small screen) e.g. small buttons, zoom in / zoom out to read etc. In this case, we have to do something, and this thing is called responsive design or mobile-friendly design.

How much Google cares about responsive websites?

Google cares about their business and respectively their customers, which in our case means the user experience when people search the web through mobile devices. The idea they have is to start ranking websites that are mobile-friendly higher in the search results. This idea will come true on 21st of April. You can read more about it here.

How does this affect you?

Well, for those of us who love spending time on the web, searching through Google, it will make our experience better because it will show results of websites that are designed and curated especially for mobile devices. Which means - we won’t need to zoom in / zoom out to read something and we won’t wonder why these buttons are so small.

For the folks that are owners of a website, first make sure you know what responsive design is then you should check if your website is responsive already. You can do it here https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly. If you have the green message (see below) then you are all good!

Otherwise, if you have something similar as below then you can give us a call and we can help you with making it responsive.

Making your website responsive has a double benefit. It will be easier for people (customers) to use it and you could have potentially more traffic to your website.

You can also read more about mobile-friendly websites here https://developers.google.com/webmasters/mobile-sites/get-started/how