Fixing your Site for a Mobile Penalty and Who it May Affect

The day we have been waiting for is finally here; April 21st. Google’s Mobile Friendly Algorithm is to go into effect at some point today and will be rolled out throughout the entire week. Google’s mobile friendly algorithm is to affect sites that are not easy to navigate through on a mobile device. To
check whether your website is mobile friendly, Google has provided a testing tool that is easy to use. Follow this link: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/ , copy your webpage URL and they will let you know whether your site is mobile friendly or not.

This factor of being “Mobile Friendly” is to be the largest and most important factor Google takes into account for its mobile ranking system. We have seen algorithms rolled out within the past few years that have shook the SEO world, and this one is expected to be even more impactful than what we have seen in the past. Online organic traffic through Google brings traffic to websites every single day. This important traffic through keywords relative to your business and services brings contact forms, leads, phone calls and money into business’s pockets. Over 50% of Google searches are made from mobile devices. This number varies depending on which industry you are in, but even losing up to 10%-20% of organic traffic can be detrimental to your business. The number of mobile searches is also only going to increase as time goes on, so the longer you wait the more you will miss out on traffic and money. It is vital to get ahead of your competition, and create a site that is mobile friendly.

After realizing that your website is not mobile friendly, there are a few ways to fix this. We have two options you can take depending what your website is built in, WordPress, HTML or another CMS platform. The first step you must take, for any website platform, is to ensure you have both Hosting and FTP access. After ensuring you have full access to web hosting and FTP files, you are ready to go.

Making a WordPress Website Mobile-Friendly:

WordPress is one of the more popular CMS platforms, due to its ease of use and user friendly themes. Here are the following steps to fix your non-mobile friendly WordPress website:

Log into hosting and make a copy of your Database.
Log into FTP and make a copy of your WordPress files.
Update your WordPress to the latest version.
Download and activate a plugin called “Jetpack”. This plugin has the ability to convert your website into mobile friendly.
Click on plugin in sidebar; connect with your wordpress account, and then finally authorize.
Click on Mobile Theme and activate this feature. Once this has been activated, your site should now be mobile friendly. If you look on your phone, you will see that the site is quite boring, so we want to add a header picture, phone number and colors that match your site.
To add these things, log into your FTP. The code we want to edit is buried deep in FTP so follow the folders you will need to click on in order to reach it: (wp-content – plugins- jetpack – modules – minileven – theme – pub – minileven.) Next click on the “inc” folder and open “custom-header.php”. We suggest in here to add an img URL of your Logo and an easy clickable phone number directly below it.

Plug your websites URL into Google’s mobile friendly testing tool and you should now be mobile friendly! If you run into problems along the way and your website can’t update to the latest WordPress without breaking the site or other things you can follow the steps below

HTML & Non-Wordpress HTML Websites:

If your site falls under this category, you will be doing much more work to ensure your site is mobile friendly. Here are the steps you need to take:

Sign into hosting & create a new database
Sign into FTP & create a directory titled “mobile”
In that folder, upload a clean, up-to-date version of WordPress files
Go to www.yourwebsite.com/mobile
Enter Database info here
Select a base theme ie; theme Twenty Thirteen or Twenty Fourteen
Make sure search engines are discouraged
Make sure all comments are turned off
Replace site title with log in header.php
You will now need to create an entire copy of your website in WordPress. This will include copying all the page information from your current site to new pages in WordPress. After your mobile site is completed, insert the following code between the head tag of EVERY PAGE on your HTML site: