Check your site and avoid a penalty

On both Google and Facebook, pages can appear organically — free of charge — as well as in paid positions. Among the most important factors deciding what position (Google) or how many people (Facebook) your page reaches is the quality and usefulness of the content for internet users.

If you are working to offer visitors quality, interesting content, it is essential to check the web pages you place it on. Following an update to its algorithm, not just Google but Facebook too will start penalising web pages that are not optimised for mobile phones.

Why are they doing it?

We keep hearing from every direction that a fast mobile site matters, that we already live in a so-called mobile-first world, where pages and content have to be designed for phones first and only then for computers. But why is that?

The numbers say it all: as things stand, 87% of active Facebook users log in from a phone. On Google, phones overtook classic computers in total search volume two years ago, and Google currently holds a 95.5% share of all mobile searches.

Even though these companies draw their largest revenues from advertising, users are what they care about first, because without them they would find advertising rather hard to sell. And since most users now reach the web from a phone, it follows that they will prefer to show content and pages optimised for mobile phones.

How to test your own site

There are several tools that will check your site for how well it suits mobile devices. Google offers two right away, PageSpeed Insights and the Mobile-Friendly Test, and other popular ones include webpagetest.org and tools.pidgom.com.

Each test offers different testing options and a different scoring methodology, which is why I would recommend running them all and then discussing with an experienced developer how to use the results to optimise the speed of the mobile or desktop version of the site.

a sample test result

You can also raise loading speed with the AMP web page standard, which stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. This version of a page contains far fewer elements, which ultimately lifts loading speed so much that you feel it loaded instantly. Pages built this way can be spotted in search results by the lightning-bolt icon.

It is not only about the website

We have to optimise, or primarily create content for mobile devices, beyond our own site as well. That goes for email newsletters, social media communication, advertising campaigns and every other channel in your marketing mix.

It is absolutely essential when creating content for Facebook. Do view every scheduled post on a phone as well, and with a Facebook ad you cannot skip the mobile preview. Facebook even offers to send the ad to your account on your phone, where it arrives as a notification. Another place to watch is your cover photo, which is cropped for mobile devices and may not look as good as it does on a computer. There are many similar cases on Facebook and they need watching.

One closing recommendation: when you create content, first consider whether it will look good on a phone, and only then adapt it for classic computers. I would follow that advice without exception for content distributed through social media. If it would not be good on phones, rather do not do it at all.

If you want to find out what share of your visitors arrives from a phone, it is easy to find in Google Analytics. You can then decide what priority to give a site perfectly prepared for mobile. And in the end, adapting the site will push that share higher still.