Title: You won’t BELIEVE how easy it is to make Google HAPPY with these MOBILE-FRIENDLY websites! Find out NOW!
Introduction:
In today’s world, where mobile devices have become an essential part of our everyday lives, the importance of having a mobile-friendly website cannot be overstated. If your website is not optimized for the mobile experience, you could be missing out on a massive opportunity to connect with your customers and drive more traffic to your site.
Fortunately, making your website mobile-friendly is not as complicated as you might think. In this article, we will show you how easy it is to make Google HAPPY with these MOBILE-FRIENDLY websites! So, strap in, and let’s get started!
Body:
- Understanding Mobile SEO:
Before diving into how to make your website mobile-friendly, it’s essential to have a basic understanding of mobile SEO. Mobile SEO refers to the optimization techniques used to rank your website higher on search engine results pages (SERPs) for users searching on mobile devices.
With the majority of online traffic coming from mobile devices, it’s crucial to optimize your website’s design and content to cater to mobile users. By doing so, you will improve your rankings, increase traffic, and ultimately generate more leads and conversions as a result.
- Embrace a Responsive Design:
A responsive design is a design approach that allows your website to adapt to different screen sizes, resolutions, and devices. This means your website will look great, no matter what device your visitors are using, whether it’s a smartphone, tablet, or desktop computer.
To implement a responsive design, you will need to use a template that’s optimized for mobile devices. Many website builders offer mobile-friendly templates, so you don’t have to create a new site from scratch. This makes it much easier to get started and avoid any potential pitfalls along the way.
- Optimize your website’s loading speed:
While having a responsive design is critical, it’s not the only thing that you need for a mobile-friendly website. Another important aspect is optimizing your website’s loading speed. Mobile users are looking for information quickly, and if your website takes too long to load, they will quickly exit and find what they need elsewhere.
There are several techniques you can use to improve your website’s loading speed, including optimizing images, using a content delivery network (CDN), and minifying your website’s code. By doing this, you will ensure that your website loads quickly, giving your visitors the best possible user experience.
- Use a Mobile-optimized Navigation Menu:
When browsing a website on a mobile device, your visitors need to be able to navigate easily. This means that you should use a mobile-optimized navigation menu that is intuitive and easy to use.
A good navigation menu should be prominently displayed at the top of the page, as this is where mobile users expect to find it. Additionally, all the main pages of your website should be accessible from the navigation menu. This will ensure that your visitors can quickly find the information they need, increasing the chances of them staying on your website for longer.
Conclusion:
In conclusion, making your website mobile-friendly is a critical aspect of modern SEO. By following the four tips outlined in this article, you can ensure that your website is optimized for mobile users and that you rank higher on search engine results pages.
To recap, the four tips we discussed are understanding mobile SEO, embracing a responsive design, optimizing your website’s loading speed, and using a mobile-optimized navigation menu. By implementing these tips, you can make Google HAPPY with your MOBILE-FRIENDLY website!
Two years ago Google added a label to its search results to indicate mobile-friendly websites. This has meant for quite a while that lightweight, mobile-friendly websites have dominated search results. Recently, they also took a stand to punish intrusive advertising on mobile devices, and now they’re finally taking the next step with mobile-first indexing. Mobile-first indexing will ensure that mobile-friendly websites dominate search results now more than ever, so the importance of making a mobile-friendly website is higher than ever.
In this article we’ll discuss how you can make sure that you’re running a mobile-friendly website and how you can change your WordPress site to be mobile-friendly, too.
What Makes a Site Mobile Friendly?
In April 2015 Google looked to promote mobile-friendly websites in their search engine, making a huge change in web design. Not having mobile-friendly websites stood in the way of Google’s main goal: giving users quick, accurate, accessible information based on their searches.
So what were the problems that Google looked to stomp out in 2015?
- Unreadable text. A lack of scalability meant that users would have to swipe back and forth to continue reading paragraphs as opposed to steadily scrolling downward in a comfortable manner.
- Dependence on plugins. Flash and Java perished for many reasons, their poor security being one of them. This was another: before HTML5, sites depended on these plugins to have dynamically-displayed content. With HTML5, however, these plugins became redundant and weren’t supported by mobile devices. Therefore, Google struck them down in search results.
- Poor link spacing. Google also had an issue with poorly-spaced links. Because of the size of a phone screen, clicking a link that’s directly beside another can sometimes result in you selecting the wrong one. For this reason, they prefer sites that space out their links.
- Long load times. Last but not least, load times. A well-optimized site should load quickly on even a 3G mobile connection.
These are the main points to avoid if you want to have a mobile-friendly site. Using a responsive theme for your site will allow you to avoid readability issues, and as long as you avoid spamming plugins and links in close proximity to each other, you should be perfectly fine.
Using WordPress to Make Mobile-Friendly Websites
An easy way to make a mobile-friendly website is to use WordPress. WordPress is a common platform used for blogs and news sites all over the Web, and due to a wide variety of custom themes (in addition to the ability to customize said themes/create your own from scratch), WordPress remains a viable platform for web creators. Plenty of WordPress themes support both mobile and desktop layouts, and in the section below we’ll give you a list of some of the ones we recommend.
For now, we’ll tell you how to check if your current theme is considered mobile friendly and what improvements you can make to improve your site for mobile browsing.
Is Your Theme Mobile Friendly?
To check if your WordPress theme is mobile friendly, plug your homepage URL into the Google Mobile-Friendly Test Tool.
If you get a result that looks like this, you’re doing fine! If you don’t, however, it’s time to take a much closer look at your WordPress site and the theme you’re using.
Step 1: Make Sure WordPress (And Your Theme) Are Fully Updated
This may go without saying, but many webmasters forget to update their WordPress platform and WordPress themes. Often, WordPress updates will appear as notification banners within your WordPress admin platform. Many times you can click this link to go ahead and start the Update process, but you can also head to “Dashboard” and then “Updates” if you don’t see that banner.
To update your current theme, go to “Dashboard -> Appearance -> Themes,” and then select “Update Now.” However, before performing this update, it’s a good idea to back up your current theme. Additionally, any customizations you’ve made to this theme will be lost in the update unless you set up a child theme on WordPress. (Child themes are sub themes that inherit everything from the base WordPress theme and allow you to safely modify a theme without losing everything each update.)
Now, run the tool again. Still doesn’t work? Proceed through these steps.
Step 2: Diagnose
If a site isn’t mobile friendly, Google’s tool will give you a few tips telling you what’s wrong with it. Usually, the issues will be with small text and a lack of a mobile viewport. Small text requires viewers to manually zoom in on the page, while pages lacking a mobile viewport will always display as if they are on a desktop monitor. If your WordPress site isn’t mobile-friendly, this is usually the reason why.
Other issues the tool may flag include long loading times or excessive on-page plugins. Make sure your web site doesn’t rely on plugins like Java or Flash. If you need those functionalities, use HTML5 instead. Also, advertisements that pop up or take up too much screen real estate can be an issue: only use non-intrusive advertisements and don’t allow pop-ups in your WordPress theme.
Step 3: Get a New Theme
Unfortunately, if a theme isn’t mobile friendly, even after being updated and removing excessive plugins, there’s not a lot you can do to fix that problem. At this point your only real choice is to get a new one if you don’t have the web design know-how to change your existing theme into a mobile-friendly custom one.
Great WordPress Mobile-Friendly Themes to Choose From
We’re going to give you a few choices for WordPress themes. All of these are made for mobile-friendly websites, and you’re welcome to customize their colors and layout to get them to better suit your individual brand. We’ll primarily list free options, but also a few premium ones.
- Lola is a great, free theme for blogging sites. It’ll look instantly familiar to longtime Tumblr users.
- Newsmag is a free theme for magazines, news sites and other more formal settings.
- Accelerate is a popular, free WordPress theme. It’s very flexible but is most useful for emphasizing art and photos, less so for text-driven content.
- Divi is a premium WordPress theme that offers a powerful visual editor, not requiring users to dive into code to make changes to colors and layouts. Its ease of use makes it popular, and it’s fortunately flexible for multiple content types.
- Uncode is a premium WordPress theme that offers a visual editor and focuses on clean, modern-looking interfaces. It’s also great for sclaing images across multiple screen sizes.
- Avada is a fairly popular premium WordPress theme and sees usage for all kinds of different sites. It also enjoys regular, frequent updates.
Conclusion
Hopefully this article will help you make a mobile-friendly website in WordPress or ensure that your pre-existing site is already mobile friendly. Do you have any other themes to recommend or advice to give people in the same boat? Feel free to sound off below!
I’m a longtime gamer, computer nerd, and general tech enthusiast.
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