Boost Your Mobile Friendliness: Test Your Website with Google
The year 2016 made history when mobile Internet use surpassed desktop for the first time ever. It should be abundantly clear that responsive web design cannot be ignored.
But just because you create a responsive layout doesn’t mean the user experience will be great. You always need to consider usability on different devices and total page load time.
Read Also: Beginner’s Guide to Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
Google recently published a brand new tool called the Mobile Website Testing Speed Tool.
With this web app, you can analyze any website and get a score based on the site’s average load time and total responsive design traits.
You just enter a domain and let it run. The testing can take up to a few minutes so try to be patient.
Once it’s done, you’ll see three scores rated from 0-100:
- Mobile friendliness
- Mobile speed
- Desktop speed
I’m not exactly sure how the mobile & desktop speeds are calculated, but they do seem to differ.
As you scroll down the page, you’ll find three different sections for each ranking.
You can click the “More details” button for a modal window explaining the specific areas checked in the list.
For example, the mobile-friendliness tester checks the viewport, font sizes/colors, and the size of tappable targets like buttons or links.
Here’s the progress check for Hongkiat’s mobile responsiveness.
It’s fairly common to get less-than-great results for the speed tests (Hongkiat actually beat Mashable!).
These ratings can be caused by many different things, and you can have Google send a list of their findings & the possible solutions directly to your e-mail.
This is one of the coolest new apps from Google and I absolutely recommend it as a general testing tool for web developers.
Note this is similar to Google’s other two tools PageSpeed Insights.
But with their new mobile site testing tool, you get to check both page speed and mobile-friendliness in the same analysis. Really great app and definitely worth bookmarking for future reference.