4 Common Mistakes Webmasters Make When Optimizing Websites for Mobile

Posted by Nitin Jain / June 18th, 2015 / No responses

Google has been screaming at web developers explaining how to properly build websites so that they will conform to Google’s rules and rank more highly or even just to keep existing rankings. Surprisingly, many online marketing professionals ignored Google and proceeded with practices such as redirecting all mobile device queries to their home page. To worsen the situation, there are so many service providers who have not even informed their existing clients that their mobile sites are not acceptable and even stand the risk of their already well-positioned websites being removed from Google.

Below given are the most common mistakes webmasters make while optimizing their site for mobile and if you are doing the same, it’s time to stop right away-

Faulty Redirects-

Google webmaster recommends you to configure the redirection correctly if you do have an equivalent smart phone URL so that users end up on the page they were actually looking for. Unfortunately, many site owners do it wrong and send every mobile user to the desktop home page, which is incorrect because that is not exactly what the mobile user asked for when he/she clicked.

To fix this, all you need is a responsive website design which will automatically serve the same content for both desktop and smart phone users. Why is it called responsive? Because it responds to its “surroundings” Simply go to the website and change the size of your window all the way down to what might look like the size of a typical cell phone. You will notice that the website responded to the size of window. This means that if you add pages, since the site is also dynamic or if you have a storefront with thousands of products, the shell of site ensures that every page in website is mobile friendly. This requires no redirects. You can also check the Smart phone Crawl Errors of your Webmaster Tools and you can simply see if any faulty redirects were detected.

Blocked JavaScript, CSS and Image Files

If Googlebot is unable to access JavaScript, CSS and Image files, indexing is going to be a tough task as Googlebot is not able to view your site like average users. This usually occurs if your site’s robots.txt file disallows crawling, which again poses a problem for indexing and will bring down your rankings.

Using Fetch as a Google feature in webmaster tool will surely fix this problem. Secondly, you should also check your robots.txt in Google Webmasters Tools and test your mobile pages with the Mobile-Friendly test. All these options will definitely help you identify any indexing problem.

Slow loading Mobile Page

Page speed is one of those important factors which entrepreneurs need to consider for an efficient mobile strategy. The time taken for a page to completely load in a browser after a request for it has been made is called time. It includes the time taken to load all scripts, images etc.

If your website has slow loading mobile pages, you need to improve page load time. This is where PageSpeed Insights tool comes into play. It gives you a look at how your mobile website is performing in just a few seconds. All you need to do is type in your URL. It simply analyses on-page factors to tell you what steps you might need to make improvements in order to improve your website speed.

Stop 404 requests for your mobile versions

If a person tries to access a page that does not exist on the site, then the server will not have any page to send the visitor to. This type of error will have an error code 404. Many times pages on a site will get changed if sites are re designed. At that time, some of the pages from your old site may not exist. In such a situation, if an old visitor to your site tries to visit that page, he/she may not find it.

Similarly, there are times when companies have their website setup so that users can see a page on desktop but when they try to visit the same page on mobile device, there is a 404 error.

How a 404 error can be fixed?

Check the Crawl Errors report in webmasters tool and look at smart phone tab to see if any URLs are 404 errors. Once again a responsive web design should also fix this problem.

Conclusion

In the end, everything you hear from Google should be your first move. Start with the above mentioned tips to avoid the most common mistakes and enhance your mobile optimization efforts at a faster pace.