Mobile Responsive Website Updates
I’ve been busy making a number of clients websites into mobile responsive designs recently.
It’s a well known fact that Google now takes into consideration the way that a website looks on mobile devices and can use the mobile friendliness of a website to determine how well a site will rank within its search engine results pages. As is always the case, when Google changes it’s algorithms many Seo and web design companies scramble to keep up and many cold call website owners offering them solutions and strategies for keeping their sites ranking well. Sometimes these are no more than companies or individuals plying for business. Often the updates and features they are trying to sell aren’t needed and they are almost always overpriced but sometimes their recommendations for your site should be taken seriously and maybe your web developer will be able to help you rather than just accepting the first cold caller that comes calling.
This is what’s been happening here lately. It seems as though a number of my clients who have websites that are a few years or more old have been approached by various companies telling them about Google’s new ‘mobile friendly’ search algorithms and offering to build them new mobile friendly versions of their sites. These clients have then come to me asking what it all means and I’ve been able to explain to them the virtues of a mobile responsive site as opposed to a new and separate mobile friendly site.
A mobile responsive site is simply a site that responds to the screen size that it is being viewed on. In most cases this involves changes to the layout so that the site better fits the restricted viewport of a small device such as a phone. As well as changing the layout of your site somewhat, it also allows you to streamline the site so as to make it load faster and use less bandwidth. This helps keep things working well when a user might be on a slow mobile connection and of course keeps data costs down for them too. As well as changes in layout and data overheads, mobile responsive sites also pay consideration to the user experience by making things easier to tap on when using a touch screen and a finger as opposed to a large screen and a mouse pointer.
Mobile Friendly
There are lots of changes ‘under the hood’ to make a site mobile responsive, but it will have benefits for the visitors to your site and also for the visibility of your site in search engines.
A number of my clients have been asking me to make their site mobile responsive lately so I’ve been busy with these update projects:
100%
There are a couple of others in the horizon ready for update too as soon as I get the go ahead from their owners. Of course, any new sites that I’ve built recently or that I’m currently working on are mobile responsive by default. It’s always nice to get 100% on the Google Mobile Friendly tests!
