It has been widely reported that Google may penalise your website in their rankings if you’re not compliant with their Mobile Optimization Guidelines.
So what does this actually mean for you and your website?
Keeping up with Google and their many changes and stipulations is a challenge at the best of times. Even when they take a stance, like proclaiming a preference for responsive design, they leave people confused, making contradictory statements, leaving many unsure on how best to proceed.
Implementing responsive design has many obvious benefits but it also affects your site’s performance.
Most websites using responsive design deal with slow load times. Google has proclaimed the importance of page speed for years, with slow loading pages having negative SEO consequences, meaning your Google ranking is negatively impacted.
To make matters worse there is a site speed penalty for mobile websites in the works. So it seems like Google wants us to have a responsive site that loads fast.
It makes sense that Google are putting the mobile user first, with the huge upsurge in mobile browsing globally. It also makes sense to penalise slow websites, as evidence has proven that users simply won’t tolerate slow loading sites.
74% of consumers will wait 5 seconds for a web page to load on their mobile device before abandoning the site. Whilst 71% of mobile browsers expect web pages to load at the same speed or faster than web pages on their desktop computers.
So Google recommends the following best practices:
- Make your mobile pages render in under one second: Common delays are due to external JavaScript and CSS.
- Make the mobile web faster by reducing the number of requests and amount of data transferred.
- Optimize for mobile by deferring the loading of JavaScript until needed.
- Use Google PageSpeed Insights to check your site for page loading issues.
Another key issue when it comes to mobile design is the number of incorrect redirects, due to many websites auto redirecting mobile users to their mobile friendly homepage. This is obviously ok if the user was trying to get to the homepage but not if they were trying to access a link deeper within the site.
Ideally a responsive mobile equivalent page should be provided for every standard URL and every effort should be made to ensure users are being directed to the correct page to avoid drop-off. If you don’t have a mobile equivalent, then let the user go to the page they were looking for on the full site from their mobile device. It is better for a user to access content they were looking for, rather than redirect them to an inconsequential page, which most likely is not of interest to them.
What now?
Obviously, if you don’t have a mobile friendly website yet then you should start there.
If you do have a mobile friendly website but are concerned about Google penalising you for slow loading pages or incorrect links then it is wise to review your website.
Here at Emagen Web Design Salisbury, we are experts in responsive web design and can offer various solutions when it comes to building responsive websites or optimising a website for mobile vente en ligne viagra. If you would like to speak with one of our team then please contact us or call us on 03333 444 294.