Struggling to create mobile-friendly test cases? You need a proper strategy that can help you ensure that you’re following all the best practices, standards, and requirements to implement this step. During the test creation process, you must also prioritize Google’s way of mobile-first indexing so that your website meets the Google standards of user experience, SEO rankings, and business growth.
Unfamiliar with all these requirements? Don’t worry! We are here for you. Our article will help you understand Google’s mobile-friendly requirements and how you can test your website’s mobile compatibility. We’ll also go through some of the common issues that you will face during this process, along with the best practices for implementing mobile usability.
What Are Google’s Standards For Mobile-Friendliness
Excited about implementing mobile-friendly test cases? First, you must have a clear idea about Google’s mobile-friendly standards! This will help you understand the importance of this process. To shed more light, let us go through the specific mobile-friendly criteria that Google has set for websites to rank favorably:
- The first thing is the responsive design of the websites so that they can adapt to different screen sizes without horizontal scrolling or zooming in.
- Google also mandates that all the text on the website must be readable and legible without the user needing to zoom.
- You should also ensure that all the buttons, links, and interactive elements of the website are easily clickable, and the user doesn’t have to fiddle with them.
- While creating the websites, the pages should be set up with a viewport meta tag so that they can scale appropriately for different devices and software recommendations.
- Users believe that their mobile websites should load within 2 seconds. If you have a slow loading speed, it can impact the user experience and rankings. Some of the most important KPIs that you must implement in it include bounce rates and user retention rates.
- Using popups and interstitials on your website? Make sure that you are not obstructing the user interaction or hampering the basic goals of the customer.
- Pay special attention towards optimizing all the media elements, like images and videos, so that they can load efficiently without excessive delays.
Tools to Test Mobile-Friendliness
While implementing mobile friendliness on your web applications, you can rely on multiple tools that can help you in this process. To help the new testers with this understanding, we have mentioned some of the most effective tools in this segment:
1. Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test
This is Google’s official tool that will allow you to check how your website performs on multiple mobile devices. To use this tool, you just have to enter the URL, and it will automatically generate a report highlighting all the mobile usability issues that will be present in the core infrastructure of your application.
2. Google PageSpeed Insights
This is yet another official tool from Google which will not only provide the performance analysis of your application but will also provide key insights about the factors affecting the load times of your mobile application.
Using this tool, you’ll also have recommendations to improve the page speed and user experience so that you are providing the best mobile application to your customers.
3. Lighthouse
Lighthouse is an open source mobile app testing application that is developed by Google itself. Using this tool, you will have access to data regarding various mobile performance metrics like UI friendliness, accessibility, and SEO performance.
Using Lighthouse, you can also understand how the performance of your mobile application fluctuates depending on various user interactions like unusual traffic or interaction errors.
4. Chrome DevTools Device Mode
This tool is integrated within the Chrome browser itself, and it will help you simulate how your website appears on different mobile devices. Currently, you will have access to various mobile and tablet views so you can understand the placement of all the UI elements of your application. Using this tool, you can also diagnose the usability issues that might be present in the app infrastructure.
The Impact of Mobile-Friendliness on SEO
As we already mentioned earlier, Google uses mobile-first indexing. This approach ensures that the search engine prioritizes the mobile version of a website for ranking it on the search results. This means by implementing mobile friendliness on the application, you will be able to achieve the following goals:
- Your website will be ranked higher in the search results and will drive a lot of organic traffic. You should also remember that a lot of incoming organic traffic will also ensure that you continue to maintain that ranking in Google search results.
- You’ll also witness lower bounce rates as better user experiences will lead to improved engagement and lower exit rates. This will also bring in a lot of referrals as users often tend to talk about their good experiences.
- Finally, it will have a very sizable impact on the conversion rates of your business. This is because a smooth mobile experience will improve the user satisfaction rates and they will most likely stick with your business for a longer period of time.
What happens if you don’t provide a mobile-friendly experience? Be prepared to be penalized by Google! How? Reduced organic traffic and visibility. In a worst-case scenario, Google might completely remove your website from its search result rankings.
So, let us understand the role of mobile-friendliness with the example of a retail website that has been experiencing high bounce rates and poor conversion rates for a long time now. By analyzing its current website, the business might realize that it has issues like small tap targets, unoptimized images, and slow page load times.
Now the business can easily get rid of these issues by implementing a responsive design, compressing the images, and improving page speed times using caching and CDN. After this, the business will start to realize that its bouncers are coming down. It will also see increased mobile conversions and also better page load times.
Common Mobile Usability Issues and Fixes
While implementing mobile usability on your web applications, you can encounter issues that can completely hamper your testing infrastructure if not dealt with properly. To shed more light over this segment, we have mentioned the major issues with their most effective fixes:
- In certain cases, the pages don’t scale properly on different screen sizes. You don’t need to panic as <meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1″> will trigger proper scaling.
- Are the text on your mobile applications too small? Are your users forced to zoom in to understand it? You must set the font size to at least 16 pixels while using relative units like % or em for ensuring proper scalability.
- The tests often struggle with small buttons and links that are placed too close to each other making them almost overlapping. If you want to eliminate this situation, you must ensure that the buttons are inductive elements and at least 48×48 pixels, along with adequate spacing.
- If popups are blocking the content on your application and creating a frustrating experience, you must use non-intrusive banners instead of full-screen popups.
- Is your website failing to adapt to different screen sizes? Consider using CSS media queries and a responsive framework like Bootstrap to eliminate this issue.
Ideal Practices to Ensure Mobile-Friendliness
Finally, let us go through some of the best practices that will further help you to ensure the mobile-friendliness of your websites. These practices will also have a direct impact on improving the productivity and quality of the application that you are currently developing:
- You can use flexible layouts that can adjust to different screen sizes while creating the mobile applications. We recommend setting the max width to 100% for images and elements so that they can fit to the screen size of your end users.
- You must optimize the images with WEBP format. We also advise using content delivery networks so that you can speed up the load times of your entire web application. You should also focus on reducing the JavaScript, CSS, and HTML files on each web page.
- How can you improve the user experience? Prioritize the user ease by placing the essential content above the fold. Use large easy-to-click buttons so that the user can perform the basic actions on your web application. You should also consider avoiding excessive popups that can harm navigation and irritate the customers.
- We advise the testers to enable accelerated mobile pages so that you can deliver faster loading web pages. You can implement this process by stripping down unnecessary elements and optimizing the content so that the basic functioning of the website is always available.
- We strongly recommend testing your applications on real devices. If you’re worried about the expense of a physical device lab, you can consider using cloud platforms like LambdaTest. LambdaTest is an AI-native test orchestration and execution platform that lets you perform manual and automation testing at scale with over 5000+ real devices, browsers, and OS combinations. With LambdaTest, you can also include selenium mobile testing to implement automated cross-browser testing on your mobile apps.
- Finally, it is very important to ensure that the navigation on your web application is mobile-friendly. To achieve this goal, you can implement a sticky header for mobile-friendliness. We also advise the testers to keep the navigation menus simple and very easy to use.
Apart from these best practices, you should continuously analyze the mobile market and the upcoming trends to ensure that you’re incorporating all the advanced practices like machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence.
The Final Thoughts
Depending on all the ideas that we have put forward in this article, we can easily say that it is very important for the testers to optimize their websites for mobile usability considering the increasing web traffic from these devices. We suggest you to implement all the approaches that we have mentioned in this article and follow the best practices to ensure that your website meets Google’s mobile standards and also ranks well in the search results.
Along with that, you can consider investing in mobile optimization to enhance various key metrics like user engagement, conversion rates, and online presence. Factors like these will play a very important role in driving the growth of your company while constantly maintaining a positive brand reputation.
Lastly, by following all the Google standards, you can future-proof your website and also give the best possible experience to your customers.
