What Are the Basics of Mobile-Friendly Testing?
Whether you are new to the world of mobile-friendly testing or a seasoned professional, there are some basics you should know before you dive into testing your website.
Responsinator
Using Responsinator for mobile-friendly tests is a great way to ensure your website’s responsiveness. The tool is straightforward to use and provides a variety of views of your website on various mobile devices.
You can use Responsinator to see how your website will look on different devices, but you can’t set custom resolutions. Instead, you can choose from many popular screen sizes, including portrait, landscape, and Kindle e-readers.
Responsinator is a more advanced tool for testing responsive design, but it does a great job. This tool is free to use and simple to set up. You will need to provide your website’s URL, and you will be able to see how your website will look on different mobile devices. You can also drag the handy bookmarklet onto your browser’s bookmark bar to access the tool whenever you are on a website.
Responsinator provides a preview of your website in both portrait and landscape views on five different devices. You can also scroll through the devices to see what the website looks like on other devices. You can also test breakpoints for media queries.
Google Mobile-Friendly Test
Developed by the folks at Google, the Google Mobile-Friendly Test is a well-thought-out program that allows you to test your website’s mobile-friendliness without the hassle of actually implementing it. With a mobile share of the web growing by nearly 30% per year, it’s essential to check your wits at the portable barometer.
The test uses a series of mobile device simulators to determine how well your site performs on smaller screens. Aside from providing a more enjoyable experience for your mobile visitors, a well-executed mobile strategy could boost your SEO game. This test also provides information on which aspects of your site deserve the most attention.
The Mobile-First algorithm, part of Google’s latest mobile update, has changed the game in the SEO space. Your site could be punished in the search rankings if it’s not mobile-friendly. This is a significant change for Google, and all web admins should be checking to see if they’re mobile-ready.
The Google Mobile-Friendly Test is just one of the many tools that Google has built into its search engine to help web admins optimize their sites for mobile devices. This includes the search engines’ Page Speed Insights, identifying what’s slowing down your mobile website.
W3C’s MobileOK Checker
Developed by the Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the mobileOK Checker is a free, open-source, web-based tool that helps determine the mobile-friendliness of web documents. It tests a website’s markup code and graphics for errors and recommends fixing them. The device also ranks the severity of its failures.
The MobileOK Checker is part of W3C’s Mobile Web Best Practices working group, which maintains and implements the mobileOK standard. The Checker is also a part of the Checker Task Force’s open-source Java library. The home page of the Checker Task Force contains links to library sources and technical documentation. The Checker also tests the HTML5 markup of a Web page and highlights errors.
It also provides a summary of the Mobile Web Best Practices. It lists several mobile sites, including Wikipedia, Google, newspapers, and mobile content portals.
The Checker Task Force also maintains an open-source Java library for the mobileOK Checker. In addition, the tool runs the mobileOK Basic Tests 1.0 specification, which defines the machine tests that the Checker performs.
Google Mobile Usability Report
Whether you have a website or a blog, the Google Mobile Usability Report can give you a better understanding of your mobile-friendliness status. A mobile usability report can tell you whether your site is mobile-friendly and if there are any specific mobile usability problems that you should address.
A mobile usability report will also give you information on what mobile devices your website is compatible with. This can help you to provide a memorable experience. It will also help you improve your website’s information architecture. If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, it can negatively affect your search rankings.
In addition to checking for mobile-friendly issues, the report will also check for harmful downloads, deceptive content, and malware. If any of these problems occur, Google will send you an email to let you know.
You will also see examples of pages that were found to have mobile-friendly issues. These include small font sizes, unloadable resources, and accessibility issues.
