I speak a lot about responsive or mobile friendly web design, I’ve always told my clients it’s a non-negotiable. It’s more expensive and time consuming, but if you’re spending money to build a website, you might as well capture your full audience. With 60% of web traffic now coming from mobile*, why would you leave out more than half of viewers?
Now, Google has just announced that beginning Nov 18, 2014, they will make it easier for mobile searchers to find responsive sites by adding a “mobile-friendly” label to their mobile search results.
image courtesy of Google
A page is eligible for the “mobile-friendly” label if it meets the following criteria as detected by Googlebot:
- Avoids software that is not common on mobile devices, like Flash
- Uses text that is readable without zooming
- Sizes content to the screen so users don’t have to scroll horizontally or zoom
- Places links far enough apart so that the correct one can be easily tapped
Want to see if your website fits the bill? Use Google’s Mobile Friendly Tester.
So, if you’re site isn’t mobile friendly, you’re already losing 60% of your customers. Once this Google program has a full roll-out, you’ll be losing even more. The time to make your site responsive is now.
Information for this post comes directly from the Google Webmaster Central Blog.
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