The gig is up. If your website is not up to scratch on small screens you could be about to lose a lot of traffic.

Mobile browsing has been increasing exponentially in recent years, and with mobile search now surpassing desktop search, Google is worried about the quality of its results, so much so they are now going to penalize those sites that are unusable on mobile – and there are still a lot of them out there.

What you need to know

If your site is unusable on a phone or tablet, your site’s pagerank is going to nose-drive… on mobile. But with your site probably receiving half its visitors from mobile search, that is a lot of missed opportunity and a huge hit in visitors.

Google does not recommend separate mobile sites with redirects. This is not mobile friendly, it’s mobile annoying.

Responsive websites are the same site on mobile as on desktop, the layout adapts to the size of the screen (as well as other factors), offering your visitors the same content and great experience on any device.

 Resources

 Test your site’s mobile readiness

Create a new responsive website

Stuart S.

Stuart is Technical Director and Managing Director at Waqa Studios.