Starting The Process
The first thing you need to do is to check if your website is mobile-friendly or not.
The best way to do that is to manually open your website on a mobile device and check if it is working as expected or not.
Here, we will assume that you don’t have a mobile-friendly website i.e: your website does not scale to the size of a mobile device correctly.
There are mainly two ways you can create a mobile-friendly website.
Responsive Websites (Recommeded)
Responsive websites are websites that are responsive to the screen size. This means that all the elements of the website viz buttons, menu, images etc change their size according to the screen size.
There are already themes that you can use right off the bat which are mobile-friendly. So, you don’t need to do much work.
If you are writing HTML/CSS to create a website then you can use some framework that is mobile friendly.
One such design framework is Bootstrap. If you are a developer then you know what that is and if you are not, you need to tell the developer that you need a responsive website and the developer will handle all for you.
Google recommends using only responsive websites.
That is because, in such websites, the URLs, design elements and content of the website stays the same on both devices.
This, however, is not the case when you go another way for creating a mobile-friendly website.
Seperate Mobile Website (Not Recommended)
Having a separate mobile website meant for a mobile device is another way you can have a mobile-friendly website.
In this case, URL, images and other elements of the website do not stay the same on both devices and hence this is not recommended, though Google supports it.
In this case, there is a lot of work you need to do. You need to create entirely a different website for mobile where you have to make sure to use the same images, same content and telling Google that this is another version of your Desktop website.
If, still, you need to make a separate website for mobile devices, here are few things you need to care of:
The first thing is to maintain the consistency of the design on both versions.
This might include your brand colours and images since you don’t want your users to think that this is some other brand competing with you.
Tell Google that this mobile website is actually another version of your Desktop through the rel=alternate tag. There is a resource at the bottom about how you can implement the rel=alternate tag.
You need to make sure that your mobile website is indexed properly since that version of your website will be used for indexing and ranking as discussed in the previous guide.
To conclude, we and Google recommend using only responsive websites as it saves your work and resources. Implementing a responsive website is quite cheaper than having a separate website for a mobile device.
Having a responsive website gives you much more flexibility and saves you a lot of time, both in implementing as well as maintaining.
Next, we will discuss how a website’s information architecture affects your SEO progress and usability.
Search Engine Code Team is comprised of SEO experts and strategists having more than 20 years of combined experience. We keep testing and delivering knowledge of SEO for the community of SEO.
Leave a Reply