The large number of mobile devices being used to surf the web now means you really have to ensure your site is mobile friendly. Today, mobile devices are used more than computers around the world.
People are 5x more likely to leave a website that is not mobile friendly. The purpose of the mobile friendly website is to help prevent frustration among mobile searchers, who are annoyed of visiting websites with really small text, difficult-to-tap links, or sites that have to be scrolled sideways to view all the content.
If you haven’t realized by now, search engines are starting to take websites’ mobile-friendliness into account when ranking pages.
Websites that aren’t mobile-friendly experience a drop in visitor retention and page ranking. Now just think of your newly developed website not being mobile friendly. How much traffic, visitors, or sales you are losing daily, because your site can’t be viewed properly on a mobile device. Take a quick glance around, almost everyone has a smart phone and are constantly using it. It’s definitely time to go mobile.
here are many different ways to test your websites mobile compatibility. Here are 4 ways you can check your sites mobile friendliness.
1. Actual Mobile Devices
Using actual mobile smart phones, tablets and other mobile devices is the best way for testing your websites mobile friendliness. Why? Because there are many parts of the experience that can’t be faked, such as: network conditions, pixel densities, the relative size of tap targets, and real page load times. Yes, this approach is not practical because it is extremely time consuming but it gives the best results.
Get family and friends to view your site on their devices and give you feedback. This way of testing gives better and real-life experience results than programs. The more devices you view your site on the better you can optimize and evaluate your sites’ mobile friendliness.
2. Think with Google
Google offers a site that helps you to check your websites’ mobile friendliness quick and easy. Its method of testing your site comes very close to what you would expect using a mobile smart phones. When testing your site, Think with Google provides scores out of 100 for 3 sections: Mobile Friendliness, Mobile Speed, and Desktop Speed. Google also provides solutions to help optimize your site better.
3. MobiReady
MobiReady is another really good website that allows you to test your site. MobiReady provides a visual view and a details and recommendations view for your site’s mobile friendliness. Its visual view doesn’t give the exact display of your site on mobile devices but it comes close. The details and recommendations view is great and gives a lot of information about your site and which areas to work on.
4. BrowserStack
BrowserStack is a site that offers a wide range of real devices and browsers to test your site’s mobile performance. BrowserStack offers a virtual, interactive environment within your browser, so you can test a web application in real time.
The down side about browserstack is that it is not free like the others mentioned above; but they do offer a free trial.
What do you use to test your site?
This is a very short list of tools to use to test your mobile sites performance. There are many more tools available but in my opinion these are my favorite and most used tools. If you know of any better tools, feel free to share with me what you use and also share what you think about the ones mentioned above.