Google’s search engine now ranks and indexes pages on the mobile versions of sites rather than the desktop one. This follows the rapid move by consumers to mobile devices.
In fact, more people now search google on a mobile device than at their desktop have done so since 2015. Google will still crawl desktop versions of web pages and these could still rank higher if the content is more relevant and useful for the searcher. However, with most people now searching the web from the mobile, you will be missing out on valuable traffic if your site is not loading quickly and properly on these devices.
What steps should you take?
Mobile friendly is not the same as mobile responsive. Most sites now are ‘mobile friendly’. This means that they are designed to work on a mobile device with slim formatting and text blocks. The result can be that these sites, when viewed on a desktop, look a bit unfinished with a lot of blank space.
What’s the solution?
A fully ‘mobile responsive’ website where the size of the elements such as images, text blocks, borders and buttons, adjust to the size of the window they are viewed on. These sites can be viewed on a phone, tablet or desktop and users won’t notice the difference.
If your site is not currently mobile responsive it is worth investing in an upgrade. Responsive websites are more likely to rank higher in the search engine results page. If your user experience is good, they will stay longer.