Getting Ready for Google’s Mobilegeddon
13 Apr 2015
If you haven’t heard yet (and I hope I’m not the one to be bringing you this news), Google has re-written its algorithm that ranks how pages accessed from a mobile device will be ranked in search results.
This has the blogging world (and Google itself) awash with a sea of tips and advice for ways to make the pages on your website more mobile friendly. You’d think Google had announced the end of the world…although, I suppose it is the beginning of a new world of mobile-friendly search results.
Anyway.
Instead of offering you any advice, about how to get your site ready (aside from the obvious one of asking Google), I want to talk a little bit about our journey to make the OpenCRM site more mobile-friendly.
We launched a new website last summer and one of the big goals of the site was to make it as mobile friendly as we could. We used clever code and plugins to help our site be responsive to changing screen sizes and also easily navigable for touch screens. It wasn’t easy, but it was all worth it in the end and we ended up with a site that we loved and that was mobile friendly in every way we could manage.
Saying that, when our website queen ran Google’s mobile friendly test we were a little surprised to see that our ranking wasn’t as high as we’d hoped.
There were a few easy fixes, such as adding a little extra space around some of our links, but others left us scratching our heads. There are a few caching issues that need addressing and a very odd error that appears to have been fixed with a simple plugin update. All in all, we’ve ended up with a workable plan to have our site ready for 21 April, with some additional updates to be applied and a few minor formatting changes that are just waiting for a final test.
It just goes to show that even with the best of intentions and a plan for a mobile-friendly site from the start, Robert Burns was right…the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.
Although I originally hail from northern California, as soon as I arrived in Yorkshire I knew it was the place for me! At OpenCRM, I started out in the Business Development team, and then moved into compliance and Q&A because I love telling people what to do…ok, that’s not the real reason, but it makes for a good bio one-liner. When I’m not in the office, you can usually find me tramping through the dales, crafting, gardening, or with my nose in a book.