Google’s moves to mobile first indexing provides one more good reason to optimize your website for all size screens. The notification that I received explains it like this:

Mobile-first indexing means that Googlebot will now use the mobile version of your site for indexing and ranking, to better help our (primarily mobile) users find what they're looking for. Google’s crawling, indexing, and ranking systems have historically used the desktop version of your site's content, which can cause issues for mobile searchers when the desktop version differs from the mobile version. Our analysis indicates that the mobile and desktop versions of your site are comparable.

What it means to be “mobile friendly”

Most modern websites use a technique called responsive design to achieve mobile friendliness. An understanding of what responsive design can and can’t do is often helpful for website owners.

Responsive design works by detecting the width of the window (known as the “viewport”) of the device requesting the page. It then selectively applies CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) style rules to optimize the page for that screen. These CSS rules override the default styles for the site. The site designer may have chosen to make the default “mobile first” or “desktop first” but the end result is the same: the site is usable at all screen sizes.

CSS is a powerful tool for controlling the layout of a page. Some of the formatting changes that are commonly applied to achieve responsive design:

• Changing margins
• Removing “floats” to change multiple column designs to single column
• Changing font sizes
• Hiding text or design elements
• Hiding menus until an element is clicked (may also use a bit of Javascript)
• Changing background images (often to make them smaller to load faster on cellular data)

There are also some things that can’t be achieved with CSS:

• Changing content, except in very limited cases
• Changing the order of content
• Changing images other than background images

Working within these constraints requires a lot of advance planning on the part of designers, to insure that pages retain usability at a wide variety of screen sizes, simply by rearranging existing content. This is another benefit of minimalist design that put focus on the content, rather than complex design elements.

Other Google Criteria

When you run Google’s Mobile Friendly Test on a website, the following errors may be reported:

• Flash usage
• Viewport not configured
• Fixed-width viewport
• Content not sized to viewport
• Small font size
• Touch elements too close

Reference Google's Web Fundamentals page for the core foundations of a delightful web experience. And if you need professional assistance with your website, just click reply to this email and let me know how I can be of help.

Until next week.