Why a mobile friendly website is absolutely essential in 2019

Paul Stratford, Creative Director

Labelled ‘Mobilegeddon‘ by Entrepreneur magazine and SEO industry insiders – the big change to Google’s algorithm back in April 2017 caught many companies by surprise. As with Google’s other updates – Penguin, Panda & Hummingbird, it negatively affected many businesses that weren’t mobile-friendly and relied on organic search for their business.

Being penalised by Google can be an expensive exercise. Depending on the extent of the penalty from Google, we’ve heard of businesses forking out 10’s of £000’s + and in some cases they simply never recovered…

Don’t get swept up in the nets!

Google is often seen as behaving God-like, deciding on the fate of businesses with swingeing changes to its algorithm. In reality, they probably make these changes to protect us all from spammy Viagra-led hacks and online crooks. So, Googles intention of serving up quality, relevant links to us all is in everyone’s interest. The sad part is that it needs to be automated and programmatic because of the scale of the task and that’s where some innocent fish will get swept up in the nets.

According to research by BIAKelsey Mobile search queries surpassed desktop queries back in 2015. This behavioural trend is set to continue with the addition of new mobile devices such as tablets and watches until mobile dominates search.

To ensure relevancy Google is set to make a change in its algorithm this April that favours websites with mobile-friendly pages. It’s a system change, or mechanical process, calculated by machines with no emotion, so it’s worth considering that there will be innocent victims amongst the tidal change who simply ‘weren’t-quite mobile-friendly enough’.

What is ‘mobile-friendly-enough’ and who’s affected?

Being Mobile friendly is a little ambiguous. If a site has a mobile-specific website then you ought to feel secure. If budgets are limited, then this is unlikely. For many SME’s, they ought to have stylesheets (CSS) that change the aesthetic view of their sites according to the devices visitors use. These sites adapt to suit the device the visitors are on (Smartphone, tablet, watch, Desktop, TV etc) and are known as ‘responsive‘ or ‘adaptive‘ websites.

How do you know?

Check how your site looks on a mobile phone. Our rule of thumb is that if you have to ‘pinch and zoom’ then you need to act. If you’re still not sure, fill in the form below and we’ll analyse your site for you with a report stating whether you’re compliant and what you can most easily do if not.

Be certain, act now.

Fill in our form below and we’ll test your site for compliance today – so you can be certain of what will happen in 2019. We’ll also provide some easy tips for what you can do in the next 24 hours to be safe.

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