I don’t post a lot of news around Google’s webmaster tools because, frankly, it will appeal to a small percentage of you who come to the site. However, this one was important and those of you who have sites big and small will want to make a note of this new feature. Google has launched a revamped mobile testing tool for webmasters that not only points out if your site is mobile friendly but will highlight specific areas where you need to improve your site. It also gives you a link to your site’s usability report with more details on what can be improved.
So why is this important? Mobile traffic to websites continues to grow and that is certainly true for tech oriented sites. Looking at the traffic here at ClintonFitch.com, well over 1/2 of you come to the site via a mobile device or the ClintonFitch.com app. This site is not unique and why much of my design efforts over the course of the past six months have been focused on making sure that readers can visit the site on their mobiles without issues.
Why are tools like this important to readers who don’t have a website? It shows you that Google is dead serious about encouraging webmasters to keep their sites mobile ready. They have been
Webmaster Mobility Testing Tool
quite open about the amount of traffic they see from mobile devices and really, at this point, there is no excuse for not having a phone friendly site.
To use the new testing tool, you need to have a site and have it setup within Google’s Webmaster tools to get the details on your site. Once you enter in the URL for the site, Google Search does a deep analysis of the site and provides you a report at the end along with a render of your site for you to see on a phone. As you can see, ClintonFitch.com is completely mobile ready and already supports AMP pages too.
