One Step Closer to Responsive Web Designing with Google’s New Update

by Guna Nadar - 3/11/2015 3936 Views

Why every business needs to make friendly mobile websites

Is your business website mobile-friendly already? If yes, then you are one amongst the lucky ones to be ranked higher in the Google SERP’s after 21^st April, 2015. An update related to search engine ranking parameter tweak has been making news for the past couple of months. This is perhaps the first time that the search engine giant has announced an update with about 2 months to spare. According to Google, the April 21^st update is going to have a significant amount of impact on mobile searches and mobile business traffic.

According to a Google statement, the company will be using mobile friendliness of a website as a ranking factor after April 21^st. The update applies to mobile searches across languages worldwide. The intention is to help end users by providing high quality and relevant searches that are perfectly optimized for their mobile devices. As of now, Google has not come up with a name for the update.

Why is this important?

Almost 30-40% of current search traffic comes from mobile devices. Modern users are finding it much more convenient to browse through Ecommerce websites, on their mobile devices on the go. This trend will only grow exponentially.
Even if your website is ranked higher today, non-confirmation to responsiveness after April 21^st will push your ranking lower in SERPs.
Websites that are not mobile friendly will certainly experience a drop in the click through rate (CTR) after the update release.

After April 21^st, mobile apps that have been identified and marked by Google’s App Indexing will rank higher in mobile searches. However, the updated SERP will only be available to users who are signed in to Google on their smart phones. Consequently, only Android users get to see the change.

With the number of mobile users increasing rapidly across the globe, mobile responsiveness is the only way to facilitate a smooth browsing experience. Regardless of the screen size, responsive websites dynamically adjust their interfaces to enable easy navigation. From April 21^st however, this will not just remain in the realm of competitive advantage, but will also become a business necessity.

Necessary changes to think about

If your website is not yet responsive, you are certainly going to lose out on a lot of traffic, revenue and business opportunities after April 21^st. Here’s what you need to do right away:

Responsive Wordpress theme: Websites that have been crafted from Wordpress themes have the easier way out of this crisis. All they need to do is switch over to a responsive theme. These come with prior codes, facilitating responsiveness that only need to be installed. There are hundreds of free and paid responsive Wordpress themes available with the CMS.
Responsive designing: This is all about designing a single web property that can alter its display depending on the device it is accessed from. The responsive Wordpress themes had been integrated automatically earlier need to be added manually here. It comes with a few extra lines of codes / media queries that can be easily done using CSS3. However, responsive web designing also require designers to think of a flexible web interface that would provide consistency in the content placement, regardless of the device. This calls for a professional, responsive web designer.
Minimal navigation: The first step to responsive web designing is getting rid of navigations that are irrelevant to the mobile user. Mobile browsers provide extremely limited space and lesser the navigation elements, the faster would a page load. Focus on the design elements that the end users would find more relevant – product images, product descriptions, etc. Drop down buttons could also be a way out to present more information effectively.
Touch friendly navigation: Users browsing on a mobile device have their fingers as the cursor. Consequently, web designers and developers should be working on adopting touch-friendly navigation rather than the traditional behavior of ‘hovering’ or ‘miniscule clicks’. Ideally, mobile websites need to have bigger buttons (for hyperlinks), easy to touch icons and reasonable sensitivity to touch.

Google has officially announced the update release date for the first time only to make your business realize its impact and react to it immediately. After April 21^st, there would be no looking back and non-confirming businesses can only expect the downfall in their traffic and revenues.

Category :

SEO News

Tags :

Responsive Web Design, Mobile Friendly

About Guna Nadar

Brief Info about Guna Nadar +

I mostly write technical aspects and not much into creative writing. For the past decade I worked along with top notch SEO & Internet Marketing professionals which naturally lured me into the world of Search Engines. When I am not writing I read from comics to philosophy.Antiques, Fishing, hunting are my passions. Currently I am working on Google Penalty protection and .... more info about the author