What To Do If Your Website Is "Not Mobile Friendly"

As expected, I'm getting quite a few emails from people asking me "what should I do... my website gets a "Not mobile friendly" response when I run it through Google's mobile testing tool?"  

If you've been paying attention online over the past couple of weeks, you've heard the buzz around Google's mobile algorithm update that went live today.  The update is designed to favor websites in the search results that are "mobile friendly" - meaning, you have a native mobile website that automatically replaces your desktop version on mobile devices, or your website is responsive and conforms to all mobile screens.

The sites I've been looking at today that are receiving a "Not mobile friendly" response from Google's testing tool have been easy to see why they are failing the mobile friendly test.  

The first thing I've been doing with websites people are emailing me is to simply pull out my iPhone and see what happens when their site loads.  And 100% of the time, the site that loads on my phone is the same site you get on a desktop computer.

The problem seems to be that website owners have not been responding to the rise in popularity of mobile devices.

Beyond today's algorithm update, I've been seeing the rise in mobile traffic for my clients over the past couple of years at least.  Especially in the past year, I have clients where their analytics show more mobile traffic coming to their site than desktop traffic.

So not only have website owners been negligent in responding to mobile responsiveness and design, they've also been ignoring their traffic analytics.

But we can't dwell on the past, right?  So the question today is, what can you do if your website is "Not mobile friendly?"

In my experience, the best solution is to rebuild your website with a theme that is 100% mobile responsive.  One of our client's sites that just went live today is a great example of this mobile responsive design.

Here's a screenshot of his website on a desktop computer:

And here's his website on my iPhone:

This is the exact same website, only that the theme is responsive and will automatically conform to the screen size that's loading the site.

Even better, on mobile devices, the phone number you see at the top of the screen is clickable (or tappable), making it even more conducive to generating calls for new business.

For this client's website, we used the "X" Wordpress theme, which is a responsive Wordpress template and is highly customizable.

I believe a responsive theme is your best solution to resolving the "Not mobile friendly" issue because you can focus on building an amazing looking website, and then let the theme itself resolve to whatever screen (iPhone, iPad, Android, etc...) is accessing it.

From what I've seen today, along with having a mobile responsive theme, it's equally important to integrate Google Analytics into your website so you can see how much of your website's traffic is coming from mobile devices.  Again, based on my client's data over the past couple of years, I think you'd be surprised to learn just how influential mobile traffic is to your own site.

If you decide to go the Wordpress route in building out a responsive template for your website, here's a few resources to help you get started.  These are resources we use continually for our client's, and that we also used with the new site in the screenshots above that just went live today:

• WP Engine for fast, efficient hosting
• "X" Wordpress theme
• Google Analytics plugin for Wordpress
• Leadpages for turning your website into a "lead generation website"
• Gravity Forms for highly customizable form integration.

Those are just a few of the resources I'd recommend to start with to take your site from "Not mobile friendly" to "AMAZINGLY MOBILE!".

I hope this post helps some of you that are struggling to respond to the Google mobile algorithm update.

Feel free to post the URL to your website in the comments below, and I'll be more than happy to provide you with feedback, along with some action items to consider, to make your site more mobile friendly and more effective for your business.

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Written by Bobby Holland, Founder at BipperMedia.com

Bipper Media:  Create ~ Connect ~ Convert.