So apparently in five days Google is going to punish my website and I only found out because a guy in a web dev Slack channel I lurk in posted a screaming all-caps message about "MOBILEGEDDON." Great. Love a good doomsday nickname for what is, when you actually read Google's blog post from back in February, just an algorithm update.
Here's the deal if you haven't been paying attention: starting April 21st, Google is going to use mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal for mobile search results. Sites that aren't mobile-friendly could get pushed down when people search from their phones. Search Engine Land is the outlet that started calling it Mobilegeddon and now everyone's using it, including me, apparently, in the title of this post, so I guess I lost that battle already.
Naturally I panicked a little and ran techpad through Google's Mobile-Friendly Test tool (it's just sitting there at google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly-test if you want to torture yourself too). The verdict came back in about four seconds: "Not mobile-friendly." Cool. Cool cool cool.
Turns out I'm still running a heavily hacked-up version of the Twenty Eleven default WordPress theme. I customized it back when I first started this blog and never really touched the CSS again except to fix things that broke after updates. It has a fixed 960px width. No viewport meta tag at all. Text that renders at what the test report calls "too small to read" and buttons close enough together that Google flags them as "tap targets too close." On an iPhone it looks like someone shrunk a desktop page down and handed you a magnifying glass.
I want to be annoyed at Google for this but honestly I can't be, not really. I checked my own analytics last night and just over 40% of my traffic in March came from phones, which is way higher than I would've guessed for a blog that's mostly me complaining about software. Three years ago that number was something like 12%. The web just moved and my theme didn't move with it, so fine, Google's right, my site is bad on a phone.
What I am annoyed about is how much of the "advice" going around right now is just consultants selling panic. I've seen at least four posts this week implying your traffic is going to fall off a cliff on the 21st like some kind of tech industry Y2K. It's not going to work that way. It's a ranking factor for mobile search results specifically, it rolls out gradually, and Google has said pretty clearly it's not some blanket death sentence for desktop-only sites. It'll matter more for competitive searches where a mobile-friendly competitor edges you out. For a personal blog with maybe 300 regular readers, the actual practical damage is probably small. But "probably small damage" doesn't get you clicks on a blog post, "MOBILEGEDDON IS COMING" does.
Still, I'm not going to sit here smug about it while my own site fails the test, so this weekend I'm switching techpad over to a responsive theme. Not going to lie, I'm dreading it a little because I know I'll spend two hours getting a Google Fonts import to actually stick and I'll break the comment styling at least once. That's just how these things go.
Small unrelated thing while I'm here: I finally caved and put in an Apple Watch pre-order last Friday, and by the time I got to checkout that afternoon the shipping estimate had already slipped to June. Ordered at like 9am my time, not exactly a laggard, and June. I don't even really know if I want the thing yet, I just wanted to see what all the fuss was about, and now I get to wait two months to find out. Feels very on-brand for early Apple hardware.
Anyway. If you run any kind of website and haven't checked it against Google's tool yet, go do it now, not on the 20th. I'll report back once I've wrestled this theme into shape and let you know if it actually moved the needle on traffic, or if this was all a lot of stress over an algorithm update that quietly rounds to nothing for a blog nobody's competing against in search results anyway.