If your website is not mobile-friendly - Google will punish you - JoomShaper

If your website is not mobile-friendly - Google will punish you

28 April 2015
Hits 9,186
4 min read
If your website is not mobile-friendly - Google will punish you

Several days ago Google made a major update to its mobile search algorithm that changed the order in which websites are ranked when users search for something from their smartphone or tablet browser. You can say okay - great, but why this info should worry me or my clients?

If your business depends upon online traffic, you should know. The new Google algorithm started favoring mobile-friendly websites (ones with text, no flash, easy-to-click links, and that which uses Responsive Web Design) and ranking them higher in search results.

Not mobile-friendly = nobody will see you

red-card-from-mobile-google

Websites that aren't mobile-friendly will be (or even are) on lower positions in google mobile result page - got demoted. People are using their mobile devices on-the-go and trusting that Google is delivering the results. They are not spending the time researching SERP pages, like they would on desktops, for that right link. Rather they are spending much less page views on mobile Google.

Why mobile users are so important?

google-mobile-friendy-templates

According to information (stats) from smartinsights.com, comscore.com, and other resources:

  • 83% of US smartphone owners use their smartphones in-store
  • 89% of Brazilian smartphone owners look for local information on their phones
  • 80% of Japanese smartphone owners have used their phone to go online every day in the past week
  • Nearly 33% of UK Website views are from Mobile and tablets.

Now check your Google Analytics or other stats to check traffic from mobile devices. With significant Web traffic coming from smartphones and tablets, companies can't afford to ignore the mobile Web users. Right now you should understand why it's so important.

Improve Your Search Engine Ranking using Responsive Joomla Templates

The biggest advantage of responsive design is that your site based on CMS will look good on both desktop and mobile browsers by adapting to every type of browser it encounters using the same HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code.

Joomla announced that the end-of-life of Joomla 2.5 was December 2014, and the older Joomla 1.5 project was closed much earlier. And what is more important Joomla 3.4+ is mobile friendly out of the box even with default template, which however, doesn't fit perfect for all projects especially for commercial ones. That's why we strongly suggest not only upgrade your Joomla CMS to current, also quicker and safer, version but also use responsive mobile-friendly template.

If your current template isn’t mobile-friendly, look for another Joomla template.

In most cases updating the template or replacing with new one may be all you need to do. Please check our JoomShaper template collection.

Responsive Web Design templates for Joomla 3.4

You can even use our free template called Helix3 or choose our commercial designs, which may better fit your project goals. Every Joomla 3.4+ JoomlaShaper templates:

  • Are fully responsive (mobile-friendly).
  • Can be customized, so please feel free to do it.
  • Well documented.

awesome mobile-friendly cms joomla

If you want to make sure that your page meets the Google mobile-friendly criteria check your pages with the Mobile-Friendly Test

Google needs more open doors

Default Joomla robots.txt file may block Google from accessing the resources it needs.  That's why sometimes you have to remove a few lines from robots.txt to get a positive result.
Disallow: /media/
Disallow: /modules/
Disallow: /templates/

You can find the exact resources that are blocked by Google by clicking on the "Show resources" link in Google's tester. Compare the files there to your robots.txt to determine what line needs to be deleted.

Happy mobile ending

After all tasks like: upgrade, changing template, and so on, we hope that your site will get a positive mobile-friendly score on the Mobile-Friendly Test and Google will show your URL on a higher position than it was before. So you are ready to be served to your mobile audience.

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