With mobile now accounting for over 30% of all worldwide web activity as of September 2014, and closer to 40% just in the UK, it is more important than ever to make sure your website is performing correctly on mobile and tablet devices.
Even if you are able to test your website on your own mobile or tablet, with so many different devices being available it can be difficult to determine what exactly your customers may be seeing when they visit your website for the first time. Mobile users will be especially difficult to engage on first visit, as you have a few seconds to present them with content that will encourage them to browse further and make use of your products and services. Seeing how your site works on a mobile device can be a good first step to determining if you are likely to be losing potential engagement from inadequate mobile optimisation. Google is also known to rank non-mobile websites lower for mobile based searches, so this is another factor to consider.
There are fortunately several ways in which you can check how your site performs on portable devices, and we will outline a few of them in this article.
Google Mobile Emulation
This tool can be an excellent way to get an overview of how your site views on different mobile devices. The interface is part of the developer tools included within Chrome – you can open the developer tools while on your website to quickly get a preview of various popular device sizes and orientations.
Google PageSpeed Insights
PageSpeed Insights can check for any outstanding issues that there may be when it comes to first loading your page on a mobile device. This tool will give tips on what is slowing site loading speeds and indicate where the problem areas are. It will also help for regular desktop performance as the tool splits results for desktop and mobile.
Screenfly
If you are unable to use Google Mobile Emulation, this is a great and fast alternative that gives a general overview of how a website looks at various screen resolutions, based on several popular portable devices. It is important to note that this tool only emulates screen size rather than the devices themselves however – Google Mobile Emulation allows for more accurate device emulation.
Using these tools can give you an idea of how your site performs on various devices, and are a good way to check for errors or interface elements that could be causing issues for some users. It is important to get an idea what interface elements might be hindering conversion for your customers so that these can be addressed by restructuring layouts and designs.
At InSynch we specialise in creating responsive, mobile friendly templates for all new websites, and we can offer responsive conversion work on existing websites to bring them up to date with modern, mobile friendly standards.
