So today's the day. Back in February Google said they'd start using mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal starting April 21st, and I filed that away as a someday-problem the same way I file away "clean out the garage." Well, someday showed up on the calendar this morning and I finally ran techpad through Google's Mobile-Friendly Test tool (it's just sitting there at google.com/webmasters/tool/mobile-friendly, no sign-in needed, takes about ten seconds).
Verdict: not mobile-friendly. Great start to a Tuesday.
The tool spits out a little phone mockup with red flags on it, and mine had three: text too small to read, clickable elements too close together, and, this is the one that actually embarrassed me, no viewport meta tag at all. Which means for however many years this site has been rendering on phones at full desktop width and just letting people pinch-zoom their way through it like it's 2009. I've had this WordPress install since basically day one of the blog and I never once opened the theme's header.php to check.
If you've never dealt with this, the fix for the viewport issue is one line, dropped into the head of your theme:
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
That alone tells the browser "hey, use the actual screen width instead of pretending you're 980px wide," and it's the single biggest lever for the small-text problem too, because your CSS media queries can't do their job if the browser's rendering everything zoomed out to fit a desktop layout that isn't there.
The tap target thing was more annoying to sort out. My comment reply links and the little social share icons I bolted on last year were all sitting maybe 20px apart, and Google wants roughly 48px of tappable space with breathing room around each target so you're not fat-thumbing the wrong link on a bus. I ended up padding out the links in CSS rather than touching the markup, which felt like a hack but the retest passed so I'm not going to argue with it.
Font size was the easy one. My theme (it's a heavily modified version of an old free theme I grabbed years ago and never gave proper credit for, which I still feel a little guilty about) had base body text at 13px with a line-height that was doing it no favors on a small screen. Bumped it to 16px, added -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; so mobile Safari would stop auto-resizing text in ways that fought with my own CSS, retested, green checkmark.
Here's the thing that's bugging me about all this, and I don't think it's just me being cranky: a huge number of small sites are going to get dinged by this starting today and have zero idea why their traffic dipped. Local bakeries, church newsletters, some guy's fantasy football league page — nobody's checking Google Webmaster Central blog posts from February. They're going to notice search traffic drop in a few weeks and have no idea it's connected to a meta tag. I only knew because I read way too much SEO Twitter, which, fine, at least it was useful for once.
Also I want to be annoyed at Google for calling this a "mobile-friendly" signal like it's just one factor among many, when in practice it's clearly meant to be a pretty blunt hammer. Either you pass or you're getting deprioritized on mobile search results, full stop, this isn't some 1%-weight tweak buried in the algorithm alongside two hundred other signals. Maybe that's fair. Sites that render like garbage on a phone probably deserve to lose some ranking. But the messaging around "it's just one of many factors" always undersells how much these things actually move the needle once they land.
Anyway. Techpad passes the test now. If you run a WordPress site on anything older than a couple years, go run the tool on it right now before you keep reading anything else today — it's genuinely faster than finishing this coffee I'm drinking, and if you fail, at least you'll know exactly why before your analytics start looking weird next month.