There are common mistakes that webmasters face when trying to make their websites mobile-friendly. Let’s take a look at them.

JavaScript, images, CSS

If you want to get optimal rendering and indexing, don’t disallow an access for Googlebot to the JavaScript, CSS, and images. Please remember that this little bot can see your website like an average user and even better.

How to fix

Make sure there is an access to it in your site’s robots.txt file for crawling of assets mentioned above. In another case, your rankings can be directly harmed. Google recommends making sure that JavaScript, images, and CSS are crawlable for Googlebot. You can allow the action with “Fetch as Google” feature in Google Search Console. It will show you how the bot sees and renders the content of your website. Also, you will be able to find out what indexing issues your site has. There, at the console, you can check and test robots.txt. If there are separate URLs for mobile pages, make sure you’ve tested both the mobile and the desktop URLs.

The content that can’t be played on mobile devices

Sometimes a website has videos and content that are not playable on mobile devices. They usually require Flash and other players not supported on mentioned type of devices. In the end, such content will only frustrate your users by showing an error instead of what they came for to your website.

How to fix it

Google recommends using HTML5 standard tags for including videos or animations. For animated content which displaying demands Flash or other multimedia players, specialists advise using HTML5 animations that work across all web browsers. There is even a tool that will help you to implement your ideas, with Google Web Designer it is easy to make any animations in HTML5. Also, it is better to use video-embedding. It will make the special content be playable on all devices. There should be the transcript of the video that is published on the website. Your site will become accessible to those people who use assistive browsing technologies. Also, it will be helpful to those who have browsers without the possibility to play a video format.

Faulty redirects

This issue can occur when there are separate mobile URLs. In this case, mobile users are usually redirected from each desktop URL to the appropriate mobile URL. The redirection process can often be incorrect.

How to fix it

First of all, use Google Search Console. A verified user will get a message if there is any site’s page that redirects smartphone users to the homepage or any faulty redirects are present on a site. The last ones can be found at the Smartphone Crawl Errors section in Search Console.

Another advice is to set up a server so it redirects smartphone users to the equivalent URL on your mobile version of a site.

In the case when a page doesn’t have a mobile match, users should be kept on the desktop page instead of being redirected to the mobile site’s homepage. In this case doing nothing is better than wrong actions.

Try to use responsive web design, which serves the same content for desktop and smartphone users.

Mobile-Only 404s

It often happens when users can access sites from the desktop but the same URL is shown as an error page to users who use mobile devices. If you want to get the best score for user experience, you should check if all of your desktop pages redirect to equivalent mobile ones. Please note that the mobile-friendly page can also be an error page itself.

How to fix it

Verified Google Search Console users get a notification in case such issue occurs. If there is Dynamic serving usage, a webmaster should ensure that the user-agent detection is configured in the right way. Another way to detect and fix the issue is to check the Crawl Errors report in Google Search Console. If a problem happens at the Smartphone tab there will be a list of detected URLs with smartphone-only 404 errors.

Promotion

Many websites often use interstitials or overlays which can completely cover the content of the page when a user visits it. As usual, it is a promotion of a website’s native app, also it can be some mailing subscription forms or simple advertisements. If it is impossible to close them, in the end, a website has the low score of user experience.

How to fix it

As a solution to such issue, a simple banner for the promotion of your app that is placed inline with the page’s content can be used. For such kind of banner, you can use different browser-supported banners provided by Smart App Banners or Native App Banners for Safari and Chrome respectively.

Too close placement of touch elements

Touch elements (buttons and links) should not be set close to each other. A mobile user must be able to easily tap the desired element without tapping a neighboring element. To avoid this kind of errors, ensure that the buttons and links are placed suitably for mobile visitors.

Conclusion

Since the number of users who search and visit websites from their mobile devices is growing every single moment, it is highly important to sink teeth into your website optimization to deliver the mobile-friendly version of it. Using tools that help to analyse the mentioned parameter and in time fixing of all the errors that can harm it will help you to get the best mobile user experience, high rankings, and conversions rate.