D-Day is coming if your website is not mobile friendly

It’s official. Google has announced the cut-off date for getting your website mobile friendly is the 21st of April. After this date, Google will not give a website a good ranking if not optimized correctly. Tech heads have even begun affectionately referring to the date of April 21st as ‘mobilegeddon.’ This should give you an idea of the gravity of the situation!

Google announced on their blog “Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results. Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimised for their devices.”

So what’s the big deal you may ask? Well if your website does not display correctly on mobile devices such as phones, tablets and iPads you could lose up to 20-30% of your website traffic as Google throws you down the bottom of the ranking ladder. Preference will given to those websites who are mobile friendly.

If you’re not sure if your website is mobile friendly or if you are still sitting on the fence about paying a developer to make it mobile friendly, here are some things that may help you understand what you need to do with your website and why you need to do it:

Check if it’s mobile friendly through Google’s official Mobile Friendly Test.
Understand why your website has to mobile friendly.
Google uses over 200 ‘ranking’ signals to determine where a website will sit in the search results. Being mobile friendly is one of the major signals and will outrank a website which is not mobile friendly.
A majority of your website visitors will be viewing your website on their phone or iPad.

Having a website for your business is an investment and something which needs to be maintained. If your website is not functioning properly, doesn’t look right, is hard to navigate and has broken links when people are browsing through your pages, Google or not, you will be losing customers. The new algorithm will apply across the board and will not discriminate with it’s mobile friendly rankings, even if you are using a PC.

If you would like to speak to someone about your website or if you are not sure if your website already is mobile friendly, then please contact one of our team today and we can help you out.