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If you read Google’s announcement on Feb 26, 2015, the first question you likely asked yourself is — is my website mobile friendly? Google announced that starting April 21st, they will consider how mobile friendly your website is, as a ranking signal. This means if someone searches for your business from their mobile — a smart phone such as an Android, Blackberry, or Apple iphone, or from an ipad or tablet, Google may lower your search results, or not even show your website in the results at all.

What should you do to ensure your website is mobile friendly?

  • Enter your website at Google’s Mobile Friendly Test page, or have us compile a report for you on the steps needed to make your website more mobile friendly.
  • If possible, update your website with these changes before April 21st, so that your search rankings for those on mobile devices is not reduced.

For our customers, or anyone using WordPress, a couple solutions that might help you minimize costs during the transition, or even make them free.

  • Choose a theme that claims to be using Responsive Web Design (RWD). Being responsive, means that a website can comfortably resize for any screen size or shape. For example, will the images on your website appear smaller if viewed on a small device, or will they look the exact same size, filling the screen?
  • There are a few WordPress plugins that can come to the rescue, specifically WPTouch and WP Mobile Detector. What these plugins do is leave your existing website as is for desktop users, but they offer a specialized theme for your mobile visitors. While it won’t look the same to someone looking at your website from their desktop, as it will when they look at it from their phone, it has the advantage that it’s easy, and your website will instantly be mobile friendly (although make sure to test it again with Google’s Mobile Friendly Test page again, to be sure!). Then when you have more time or money in the future, you can redo your website to be responsive.

We’ve brought in design and CSS professionals this month to help meet the demand, so give us a call to ensure your site is optimized before the April 21st deadline. Although we can complete this process in less than a day for most websites, we will commit to fixing and transitioning every website to a mobile friendly version by the deadline, as long as you begin the engagement by April 7th, giving us 2 weeks.