Is Your Website Mobile Ready?

Is Your Site Ready To Be Viewed on Mobile?

Holidays are upon us, and we all fall prey to last-minute online shopping ...well at least I do. If you feel that you are missing out on online shoppers because your shipping methods, site information or photography are not ready to show off your products to customers then you are losing out.

Mobile Friendly

The first thing to do is to check whether your property sites are actually mobile friendly. The easiest way to do that is with Google's mobile-friendly testing tool. All you have to do is put the URL of each site in, and click the "Run Test" button. In seconds you'll either be told that it is mobile friendly or that there are issues that need to be addressed, such as buttons being too close together — which would increase the potential for the wrong one being hit. After you fix the issue(s), run them through the tool again, until you're told you've passed.

Page Speed

Google integrates mobile search and page speed into its ranking algorithm. This means that besides being mobile friendly, your site should also be fast. Ideally, Google likes to see pages render on a mobile device in less than a second. If your property sites take longer than that, then you could be negatively impacted.

How can you test? There are a few tools out there to help. The Google Page Speed Insights tool is the one that is the easiest to use. As with the mobile-friendly tool, all you do is enter your URL and it comes back with a grade out of 100. Anything in the green is good (although the higher the better). If you score below that, it will offer suggestions for improvements that you can pass onto your website development team.