Make your website mobile-friendly by April 21, says Google

Author’s update on April 22: It’s better late than never! Giving Google what Google wants is like paying tax. If you don’t do it by the due date, you will pay a penalty, but it still has to be done and the penalty will stop as soon as you do it. So it’s time to make your website mobile-friendly, it only takes a few days!

Google recently made an announcement that as of April 21, 2015, they will favor websites that are mobile-friendly. Google has been testing this idea for some time now, and they have now made it official policy. Essentially, Google will determine whether your website is mobile friendly or not; if it is not mobile-friendly, for mobile searches, your website will show up after those that are mobile-friendly.

The bottom line: you are going to lose business to competitors with mobile-friendly websites

This change by Google is expected to have significant impact on traffic. Dubbed “Mobilegeddon” by industry insider, some predict that this “google slap” will be bigger than the two former changes introduced by Google: “Panda” and “Penguin”, which wiped out Google-based traffic to many major websites. If your website was built a few years ago and you have not upgraded it, it is probably not mobile-friendly. Here’s the good news: you still have (a little) time to fix it now and make your website mobile-friendly!

Google test tool: see if your website is mobile-friendly

If you don’t know whether or not your website is mobile-friendly, take a few seconds to find out by using this simple test tool from Google: www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/?utm_source=wmc-blog&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=mobile-friendly&url. According to Google, our two websites are “Awesome” and mobile-friendly: