In 2015, Google made a big announcement – if you didn’t have a mobile website, they were going to lower your ranking and drive less traffic to your website. During that period of time previously, I saw a mad dash of website owners frantically trying to do whatever they could to make their website mobile-friendly before Google flipped the switch and de-ranked them.

If you are a business owner with a company website, losing any traffic at all can make the difference between having a profitable month or losing money. The good news is most (but not all) of the websites I encounter these days have a version of their website targeted towards mobile visitors. Some users have a theme that’s responsive (it adapts the look and feel of the website based on the visitor’s screen size), and others use custom plugins like WPtouch to obtain mobile-friendly status with Google. Both solutions work and are great, in theory.

The problems I see these days around mobile websites typically involve one of two groups. The first group are users who had a custom theme developed at some point, but haven’t updated it for mobile yet. Many of those sites simply show the desktop site for mobile visitors, which is a horribly poor experience and will undoubtedly result in a lowered Google rank for that site.

The second group of websites I see that need help are site owners who purchased a commercial WordPress theme that advertised a responsive mobile website, but then failed to evaluate their own mobile site once their custom content was added. Often the content they added completely broke the look and feel on mobile, leading to not only a diminished rank, but a poor end-user experience all around.

When we launch a new mobile website, we don’t just don’t evaluate it based on what we think, we also make use of the various public tools (such as Google’s own Mobile-Friendly test) to determine how well the mobile site performs. That way we can rest easy knowing that Google is happy with the mobile version of the site and will properly rank it going forward. As Google has adopted a mobile-first position nowadays, your mobile site really needs to be as polished as your desktop one going forward, and we take that responsibility seriously.

If you need a mobile website developed for your business, or want us to evaluate the current state of your mobile website, feel free to contact us and let us know how we can help.