Some will remember a post last year which talked about Google requiring sites to be mobile friendly (read it here). Well, it looks like they are soon to take it another step and go with a mobile-first index soon.

So far they’ve always gone with desktop websites but this change will mean if your website isn’t mobile friendly then it will drop right down the results. It’s not surprising. The stats have shown a significant increase in mobile use over recent years.

What does this mean? Well, you need to make sure your site is mobile friendly. That is, when viewed on a mobile it conforms to certain criteria, eg. the text is large enough to read, you don’t have to zoom in and out, images fit nicely on the screen, etc. Google has created a tool to make it easy to check here.

The best way is to design the site to be ‘responsive’. That is, it ‘responds’ to the size of the display. So if you’re viewing on a mobile, it shows in a mobile-friendly way. If you view it on a tablet, it adjusts to that. By using this technique, you don’t need to duplicate any content.

For the last couple of years we’ve always built sites to be responsive and we will continue to do so.

Please get in touch with us if your site isn’t ready for this change. We can discuss various options to make it as straight forward as possible to get ready for this change.