So I finally ran techpad through Google's mobile-friendly test tool last night and, yeah, it failed. Spectacularly. Four days before the whole internet apparently starts getting penalized for it too.
If you havent been following the SEO trade press (and honestly why would you, its mostly people yelling about meta descriptions), Google announced back in February that starting April 21st, mobile-friendliness becomes an actual ranking signal for mobile search results. Not a suggestion. A signal. Sites that dont pass get pushed down in mobile search, full stop. The SEO blogs have taken to calling it "Mobilegeddon," which is a dumb name but Ive typed it into three different search boxes this week so I guess it worked.
I want to be annoyed about this on principle, the way I get annoyed about most Google algorithm news, but I cant really argue with the premise. More than half my own traffic here comes in on a phone now (I checked the analytics, its 54%, which surprised me more than it should have in 2015). A desktop-only layout at this point is basically telling over half your readers you dont care that much about them showing up.
Anyway. The test itself is dead simple, you paste in a URL and it tells you pass or fail with a little breakdown of why. My homepage technically passed, barely, but almost every individual post page failed because of a leftover 960px-wide sidebar div from a theme tweak I made in like 2013 and then never touched again. Text too small to read, clickable links stacked close enough together that youd fat-finger the wrong one on a phone, the works. Classic "it looked fine on my monitor" mistakes.
The annoying part isnt fixing it, its that fixing it properly means actually going back into a theme I havent opened in ages and untangling CSS I apparently wrote at 1am. There's a version of me that wants to just slap a viewport meta tag on the header and call it a day, and Google's test would probably even pass that, technically. But that's the kind of half-measure that makes a site "mobile-friendly" in name only and still miserable to actually read on a 4-inch screen. I'd rather do it right, even if right means losing an evening to media queries.
A few things I've picked up messing with this the past couple days, in case anyone else is scrambling:
- The test tool checks page by page, not site-wide, so dont just test your homepage and assume youre fine. My homepage and my about page passed no problem. My actual blog posts, where basically all my traffic lands from search, did not.
- Text size and tap target spacing seem to trip people up more than the "responsive vs not" question itself. You can have a non-responsive site that still passes if the text is big enough and links arent crammed together, though I wouldnt recommend stopping there.
- If youre on WordPress with an older theme like I am, check whether your theme even has a viewport meta tag at all. Mine didnt. One line fixed the most obvious flag.
I'm not going to pretend I have this fully sorted before Tuesday. I might not. Realistically Ill get the post template fixed and the sidebar issue patched and call the rest a problem for future me, which is basically my policy for everything on this blog going back to 2011.
Separate but related complaint: everyone keeps framing this as some kind of judgment day for the web, and I get why, "Mobilegeddon" is a fun word to put in a headline, but its worth remembering Google telegraphed this two months in advance and put a free testing tool right there for anyone to use. If your traffic craters on the 21st it's not really a surprise attack. It's a deadline you had two months notice on and ignored, same as I apparently did until last night.
Anyway. Off to go find whatever genius past-me thought a fixed-width sidebar was a permanent decision.