Google has made it clear that they want you to have a mobile friendly site, in fact if your site is not mobile friendly you may have noticed a drop in your rankings. In the past year, Google has been very vocal with their many mobile-friendly updates, and just this past month announced that they will begin to increase the effects of the mobile friendly ranking signal. If your site is already mobile friendly you don’t have much to worry about but if you’re not compliant with their mobile optimization guidelines you could be getting punished.
Google wants to put mobile users first, which is why you need a mobile site. Here are some of the most common mistakes when building a mobile site.
Page Speed: Page speed is not only an important ranking factor it is one of the most important factors to users. In fact, 74% of consumers will only wait 5 seconds for a web page to load before abandoning the site. To help your mobile site load faster try resizing all images to the smallest possible size, this will help reduce load times.
Faulty Redirects: One other common mistake with mobile sites are faulty redirects. Many times a desktop site server is setup to redirect all smartphone visitors to the mobile websites homepage, but sometimes users are not trying to access the homepage. This creates a frustrating user experience. Ideally, you want to make sure there is a mobile page for each URL on your desktop site.
Unplayable Videos: Many times videos are unplayable on smartphones. For example, not all content formats such as Flash, are supported by all mobile devices. Google recommends using HTML5 standard tags to included videos.