I finally got around to running techpad through Google's Mobile-Friendly Test tool this afternoon, mostly because I couldn't put it off any longer. Google's mobile ranking change went live on the 21st, which means as of right now, five days in, this blog is apparently being quietly punished in search results because the sidebar doesn't collapse on a phone screen. Great.
If you haven't been following this (and honestly, why would you), Google announced back in February that starting April 21st, whether or not a page is "mobile-friendly" would become a ranking signal for mobile search. Not a huge one supposedly, page-level not site-level, but enough that some SEO blogger somewhere decided to call it "Mobilegeddon" and the name stuck because of course it did. Everything needs a dramatic name now. Nobody in tech journalism can just say "algorithm update" anymore, it has to sound like an asteroid is coming.
So I ran the test. It fails. Text too small to read, clickable elements too close together, content wider than the screen. All three, on basically every post. I built this theme myself in like 2012 on a weekend when I had strong opinions about three-column layouts and none about phones, and it shows.
I want to be annoyed at Google for this but I can't really manage it. I've known this was coming for two months and did nothing, which is a very me thing to do. I have a whole folder on my desktop called "techpad-redesign-2015" that has exactly one file in it, a Photoshop mockup I started and abandoned in March. The honest problem isn't Google, it's that redesigning your own blog is one of those tasks that feels optional every single day until suddenly a search engine tells you it isn't.
What actually annoys me is watching this play out on Twitter this week, where every third tweet from anyone who works in web dev is either a screenshot of their own site failing the test, or someone smugly announcing theirs already passed because they rebuilt on some responsive framework last year. There's a real flavor of panic to it, small business owners asking their web guy in ALL CAPS whether their site is about to vanish from Google. It won't, not overnight, but nobody who dreads reading Google's algorithm posts is going to sit there and parse "this is a gradual rollout, not a switch-flip." Fear travels faster than nuance, always has.
Here's the thing that actually bugs me about the whole mobile-first push, and I say this as someone typing on a full keyboard right now: I still don't love reading long stuff on a phone. I don't think I'm alone in that, either. Mobile traffic keeps climbing on this blog's stats page, month over month, no argument there. But "mobile-friendly" as Google defines it and "actually pleasant to read a 900-word post on" are not the same thing, and I worry the industry is going to optimize hard for the former and just assume the latter follows. It doesn't always.
Anyway. I'm not going to pretend I have a grand plan here. What I'm actually going to do is strip the sidebar down to almost nothing, bump the base font size up, and stop pretending three columns of widgets nobody clicks are worth the layout complexity. That's it. That's the redesign. I've been sitting on a fantasy of some full rebuild for a year and the real fix is embarrassingly boring.
Small aside, unrelated to any of this except in the sense that it's also eating my Twitter feed this week: half the people I follow are unboxing Apple Watches right now and comparing which band they got, and I genuinely have zero interest in strapping a screen to my wrist that needs charging every night. Maybe that changes. I doubted smartwatches were worth caring about two years ago too and I still kind of do, so take that with whatever grain of salt seems appropriate.
If your site fails the mobile test too, don't panic about it the way half of Twitter currently is. But also don't do what I did and let it sit in a folder for two months. Test your stuff. It takes ninety seconds and google gives you exact line items of what's broken, which is more than most tools bother to do.