Friday, June 3, 2016

Google launches tool to test your site’s mobile friendliness and speed

Announced on the Google Small Business blog yesterday: a new tool to test how your site works across different devices. 

It seems to be a combination of the mobile friendly and page speed tools, though it is useful to have these tests in one place.

According to Google:

On average, people check their phones more than 150 times a day,  and more searches occur on mobile phones than computers. But if a potential customer is on a phone, and a site isn’t easy to use, they’re five times more likely to leave.

To avoid losing out in these crucial moments, you need a site that loads quickly and is easy to use on mobile screens. The first step is seeing how your site is performing. We can help by scoring your site for mobile-friendliness, mobile speed, and desktop speed.

It’s a simple tool to use. Just enter any URL and results are returned quickly. Here are the scores for this site. Could do better:

SEW test

In addition, Google will send a detailed report showing the reasons behind the scores and suggested fixes. I’m still waiting for mine though.

It’s a good way to quickly check your mobile-friendliness and page speed, and since some aspects can be fixed relatively easily (such as optimising images) it could be very useful for small businesses.

There are other complimentary tools too, such as Mobilizer, which shows how your site looks across a range of devices.

mobile

With page speed set to be a factor in Google’s next mobile update, its also a good way to check on mobile speed.

Our score isn’t great, and the same applies to other publishers. Indeed, I couldn’t find a publisher with anything but a ‘poor’ score.

forbes speed forbes speed

In fact, it’s hard to find any site with great scores here, apart from this one:

google

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