In the past couple of years, the sheer importance of having a mobile optimized version of websites has increased drastically. Google played a significant role in forcing the web to adapt to mobile devices in order to reach the new smartphone-only generation. Along the same lines, Google has made its mobile-friendly test tool available to developers via a brand new application programming interface (API).
As users make the shift to devices where apps dominate, Google too needs to do everything in its power to make sure the mobile web is as usable as the desktop web before it. Google’s API is aimed at helping business owners determine how well their website performs on the mobile web, including both smart phones and the tablets.
The launch comes at a time when Google is focused upon transitioning its business to the mobile web. The API is a simple and quick tool that can be used by web developers to build their own tool to see what pages are mobile friendly.
The API method runs all the tests, and returns the same information- including a list of the blocked URLs- as the manual test.
said Google’s john Mueller.
The documentation includes simple samples to help get you started quickly.
As a publisher or business owner, simply add your website link at the URL field and click on analyze to see if your website passes or fails the test. The tool can also offer a more detailed report that makes suggestions on things that you need to fix.
This new testing tool simplifies the user interface and shows scores as good(green), fair(yellow) and poor(red). Meanwhile, here are some of the factors which you can consider while making your website mobile friendly:
- Choose a mobile friendly website building platform
- Avoid using flash or any other software which is not common on all mobile devices.
- Text of the webpage should be readable without zooming.
- Sizes content to the screens so users don’t have to scroll horizontally or zoom.
- Links should be placed in a way so that they can easily be tapped and have enough space between two links.
Google’s mobile friendly badge will soon be available globally and it is strongly recommended that you ensure that your website is mobile friendly by then. Why? Well, because as Google told everyone last year, “mobile friendly” websites will be ranked higher in search results by Google’s algorithms. A pretty strong motivation for making your websites mobile-friendly, if you ask me.
