Google Will Turn Up the Mobile-Friendly Signal in May

What Google said on Wednesday

Google said yesterday that from May it will increase the effect of its mobile-friendly ranking signal in searches made on phones.

The signal itself is not new. Since April last year, pages that pass Google's mobile-friendly test have had an advantage in phone results over pages that do not.

What changes in May is the size of that advantage. Pages that already pass are not affected. Pages that fail will find it harder to compete for phone searches.

For many local businesses, more than half of all visits already come from phones. That makes this worth acting on now, not in May.

What the test checks

• A viewport setting that tells phones to fit the page to the screen.
• Content wider than the screen, which forces sideways scrolling.
• Text too small to read without zooming.
• Links and buttons too close to tap accurately.
• Plugins phones cannot run, such as Flash.
• Files blocked from Google, so it cannot see the page as a phone would.

The second is the one most older sites fail. A layout built for a fixed width, a wide table or an embedded booking widget pushes past the edge of the screen, and the whole page fails with it.

Page by page, phone searches only

The signal applies to individual pages, not whole sites. A home page that passes does not carry the booking page or the old blog posts with it.

It applies only to searches made on phones. Results on computers are unchanged.

And it is one signal among many. Google has said that a page with great, relevant content can still rank well on phones without passing. The advantage counts most where several pages are otherwise close.

Where older sites fail

Sites built before about 2012 were usually designed at a fixed width, often around 960 pixels, for a computer screen. A phone shrinks the whole page to fit, and the text shrinks with it.

Menus with small links set side by side become impossible to tap accurately. Footers packed with links are worse.

Tables of prices or hours, galleries of tiny thumbnails and forms with fields laid out in columns all spill over the edge or shrink beyond use.

Why patches tend to make it worse

Quick fixes are tempting with May a few weeks off, and most of them cause new problems.

Adding a viewport setting to a fixed-width layout tells the phone to stop shrinking the page, so the 960-pixel layout now runs far off the side of the screen.

Plugins that switch phones to a separate mobile theme often drop pages, menus and forms, and the two versions drift apart with every edit.

Separate mobile sites on their own address, built years ago, often redirect phones to the mobile home page, ignoring the page that was actually requested.

Each patch can pass the test on one page and fail visitors on the rest.

A worked example

An art installer that hangs paintings, mirrors and sculpture for homeowners, offices and small galleries had a site built six years ago at a fixed width, with grey text at 11 pixels and a gallery of small thumbnails.

The mobile-friendly test reported three failures on every page: text too small, links too close together and content wider than the screen.

An earlier attempt had added a plugin that showed phones a simplified theme. It listed blog posts and dropped the gallery and the services page, the two pages interior designers looked at before calling.

The site was rebuilt to be responsive, so the same pages now reflow to suit a phone, a tablet or a desktop screen, and every page kept its address.

The gallery now shows large single photographs on phones, the services table became headed paragraphs, and the phone number became a link that dials when tapped. Every page passes the test.

What a site built for phones means

A responsive site keeps one version of every page, at one address, and lets the layout adapt to whatever screen opens it.

Text stays readable without zooming. Buttons and links are large enough, and far enough apart, for a thumb. Images and tables fit the screen or rearrange themselves to fit.

Nothing is hidden or dropped for phone visitors, and every edit appears on every device at once.

That is a design decision made at the start, not a setting added at the end.

Checking every page, not just the home page

Google's mobile-friendly test checks one address at a time. Run it on the pages that bring in work: services, prices, contact, booking and the most visited posts.

In Search Console, the Mobile Usability report shows the pages Google has found with problems, grouped by the kind of failure. It is the quickest way to see the whole site.

Then look at those pages yourself on a real phone. The test catches layout problems, not a form that is miserable to fill in with a thumb.

Between now and May

A small site can be rebuilt properly in the weeks before May if the work starts soon. A larger one may not be finished in time.

If yours cannot be, the rebuild is still the right project. Start it now, and resist patches that pass the test while breaking the site for visitors.

The signal does not switch off after May. A well-built site in June is worth more than a patched one in April.

The counter-case

Some businesses will feel little effect. A firm whose clients find it by name, through referrals or on office computers may see no change at all in May.

A site that already passes, even if it is not beautiful on a phone, is not at risk from this change.

But the trend runs one way. Visitors on phones judge a site that is hard to use whatever Google does, so a site built for phones remains the right fix, sooner rather than later.

Before May

1. Run the mobile-friendly test on your key pages.
2. Open the Mobile Usability report in Search Console.
3. List the pages that bring in work.
4. Look at each one on a real phone.
5. Avoid quick patches and separate mobile themes.
6. Plan a responsive rebuild keeping every address.
7. Check the in-between widths as well.

Step six is the one that settles it. Keeping each page's address through the rebuild preserves what the old pages have earned in search, while the new layout fixes every failure at once.

The widths between phone and computer are covered in the tablet width nobody designed for.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.