April 21 your list needs to be mobilefriendly

proxydesign

proxydesign

Visiolist-Fan
Now it seems that Google will begin to favor mobile friendly websites. It is not something new for most of you here, but I would like to spar with you around the responsive design.

I was at a conference in Sweden last autumn (Conversion Jam) for multiple stage was argued that the conversion rate fell when walked over to the "text-book layout" of responsive design. Since my company does not deliver sites has not been something I've set myself too much in yet, so this topic is still composed of many loose pieces on my part.

Is there anyone here who has gone from a "totally useable on mobile" website into a responsive website? And what was the effect / results / new conversion degree?
 
Mark

Mark

Administrator
Staff member
In my world this has been a key issue for the past year or so with my biggest client, this April 21 date is a very important one but truth be told its hard to say how everything will work out in the end so we are preparing both ways.

This is my real world dilemma with this :)

we have the regular domain for desktop and tablet users, the site is rich with content, lots and lots of text, 40,000 pages or so and ranks incredible in Google Organic, also converts very well.

we also have a separate domain for mobile only, it has very little text and the content is basically all a "straight to the point" summary. We use browser detection on the full website to send mobile users to this mobile only site.

PROS: the mobile site converts very well for mobile users, the content is tailored to those users (who wants to read a lot on a phone?)

CONS: poor redirects.. if a user lands on 1 of our deep pages on the desktop site, we dont always have that exact content available on the mobile site, so they are redirected back to the home page. This is bad.

Since both sites rank very well up until now it has not been much of a concern, but April 21st MIGHT change that. So to be prepared we are rebuilding the site using a responsive layout and working hard to keep the content friendly for both devices, while still maintaining our SEO and organic placement. Who knows which way will work better, but we have both directions covered and hopefully we can maintain good conversions, and also good organic placement. Only time will tell, but i suspect we will be responsive only within the first 60-90 days
 
proxydesign

proxydesign

Visiolist-Fan
Many websites use a seperate domain or folder inside root to redirect mobileusers, but I think in the future that more and more websites would be using responsive. Using the @media tag in CSS it is possible to hide elements that dont should be visible for various screen resolutions.

Google have created a website where they analyse the website if its mobile-compatible or not: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/

If it says that your website is not mobilefriendly I would strongly suggest to do something about it, and that asap.
 
Basti

Basti

Administrator
Staff member
I personally would not use that link, not at this stage at least. They say its mobile friendly, does that include major mobile brands? tablets? A responsive beginner might be told wrong facts.
If you truly wanna test mobile, check your browser inspect tool. All the major ones have mobile simulators as far as i know. Its way better to check if its mobile friendly using those, than trusting a newly released google feature.
That way its way easier to test how a site looks using mobile or tablets and even switching orientation. So if you wanna go into mobile age, use that instead

Many of us know the "oh so great and important" SEO score for mobile and desktops...ugh that things...
 
proxydesign

proxydesign

Visiolist-Fan
The feature is not that new, it has existed for a couple of time. Personally, I would rather use the Google Service, instead of what the browser tells me. If the Google site tells me its mobile-compatible (which it does), I feel i can sleep good and feel more prepared till April 21.
 
Basti

Basti

Administrator
Staff member
But responsiveness does not just include mobile, you dont know what google checks there 100%. It might just check if the mobile meta tag is there, does that qualify to be mobile friendly? By far not, i just enables it to be friendly
Does it check multiple dimensions? Who knows
Does it check if content overlaps? and many other things which are important here.
A broken mobile implementaion ( design wise, eg. the content overlap ) most likely hurts you more than allowing the visitor to default zoom in out on desktop designed sites

When you start on it do yourself a favour and even if google says your site is ready, still do manual self tests.
When coding responsive its best to trust your own eyes and actually see what it looks like on different devices and orientations ;)
 
cajkan

cajkan

Active Member
So what about this 21 April ? Whats up with that ? Do you guys have any link whats gonna happen ? I hope its not gonna be apocalypse lol

And YES, Responsive sites perform way way better then normal websites.
Example: User place 2 websites to vote, first website is responsive and loads great and if you open second website doesnt have the same feel, and might have higher bounce rate.

I would strongly recommend all users to move RESPONSIVE !
 
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