For the past couple of weeks we have been getting more and more questions about Google’s 21st of April “mobile-friendly update“, so I decided to address this issue here on the blog.
What’s this all about?
If you missed the talk around this subject then let me try and summarize what happened.
On 21st of April Google started rolling out some major changes to its mobile search ranking algorithms aimed at rewarding websites for being mobile-friendly. The “reward” is not defined clearly, so you shouldn’t expect a ton of new traffic just because you have a mobile-friendly (responsive) website.
How to know if my website is mobile-friendly?
The first thing you should know is that all of our WordPress themes are mobile friendly (responsive).
Here’s Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test Tool, where you simply fill in your website URL and in a couple of seconds it tells you the result of the test.
For some of our customers this automated test fails for (usually) the same reason: customization. If you did changes to the theme’s code and it wasn’t done correctly, then this test might show a bad result.
What professionals think about it?
I highly recommend that you read these 2 articles, which explain very well what is happening and why:
- 9 Things You Need to Know About Google’s Mobile-Friendly Update (April 6th, 2015)
- 7 Days After Mobilegeddon: How Far Did the Sky Fall? (April 22nd, 2015)
Who will be affected by this update?
It is important to understand that this update refers to MOBILE rankings, so DESKTOP users should not be affected at all. If 90% of your website users access it from a desktop computer (or a laptop), then there is nothing to worry about. This concerns only search result pages for searches done on a mobile device.
One week after the update and everything is still OK, business as usual. There was a lot of talk and hype about this date, but now that it is behind us, I can safely say that everything is OK.