What does it mean: Mobile Friendly?
A long, long time ago, there were all sites in desktop size. It was a short time after the flash. It was a sad time, because flash scripts made websites amazing, like a movie. But the time of e-commerce began. Developers returned to PHP language and everything went back to the beginning.
Many websites have been developed to the most common resolution on the most common OS, which was 1024x768 on Windows XP.
The computing power of the CPU and GPU were higher and higher. Meanwhile, people started to use mobile phones to read Internet websites. Some of us remember the WAP protocol for surfing the Internet. At the same time, cable Internet connections began to speed up and developers made websites larger and heavier. This was the time of the first 3G mobile phones. 3G mode made us able to surf the Internet faster — but websites were still too heavy.
Suddenly, Google announced that in the next 3 years it would roll up all SERP (search engine result pages), and would kick off all non-mobile-friendly websites. At that time, mobile friendliness was simple to understand. There were only 3 conditions:
Responsive — which means that the height of the website is the same as the resolution of the users' screen.
Easy to click elements — which meant that the 10px square button was not functional on mobile. The dev team had to reset the website layout. I think that is really the beginning of UX.
Easy to read font — it was a funny problem, because many times scaling the width of the website was strictly related to scaling font-size. And the text on the website was impossible to read. (You can probably still see this problem in low quality newsletters.)
I can still remember the panic when many websites dropped from the top 3, top 10 and even top 40.
People asked me: "What happened?" And I answered, "Google ran the Mobile Friendly algorithm, just as I told you a long time ago." So again, people asked: "What should I do?" And I sent Google documentation and advised them to show it to their developer.
Developers, as a really lazy group, had not rebuilt websites. They used media query and wrote different website layouts for mobile devices. It was really common to see subdomains for mobile websites. Perhaps you can still remember https://m.facebook.com. A huge amount of content was still visible on the desktop, but on mobile phones there was only the most important information. That is how we began to create two different websites with two different content.
And again, Google destroyed everything. They announced "Mobile First" — which means Google will index the website as it would be displayed on a mobile device. And everything had to be done again from the beginning.
Meanwhile, we had HSPA+ and LTE in large cities, and still huge websites. When people were in lifts or old buildings with weak GSM signal, the website loading process was still a problem.
Now, we have many mobile friendly factors. Some of them are related to display issues, however more problematic and common are those that describe the speed of websites. TTFB shows us the time to first byte — the time from the first response of your server to the query of your client. FCP — First Contentful Paint — shows the time when the user sees the first valuable part of the website (mostly some banner or ATF element). Finally, my favourite — Fully Loaded — which means the time when all elements of a website are displayed on the user screen. As a digital marketing consultant, I consider page speed one of the most underestimated factors in both SEO and Google Ads performance.
I've written a bit of history of developing the "Mobile" topic of UX and developing websites. But what have we learned from the last few years?
Believe me, nothing.
Still, there are many popular websites that load more than 10 seconds. Everyone knows that loading time longer than 3 seconds cuts off about 30% of users — and imagine the conversion loss.
Fast and correctly loaded websites are strictly related to CPC (cost per click) in Google Ads. Imagine you have a $100K budget for ads per year. You make your website load faster — from 10 seconds to less than 2 seconds. Your CPC drops significantly. Let's say CPCs drop 10% — so you save 10K and have a good budget for developing new, fast websites.
There are many ways to tune up a website. We can talk about image optimisation or changing hosting. In 2022, I did some tests. For my prestige keyword "pozycjonowanie Poznań" my website was the fastest — fully loaded in about 3 seconds, while my competitors were ready in 8–13 seconds. I updated the version, updated all CMS elements, changed domain service and hosting. Finally, my website was ready in less than 1 second.
What happened? Nothing — because on my keyword I was already in the first position. But I made proof that it is possible to do an amazing job by tuning up website speed. Mobile friendliness is inseparable from good content on the website — speed gets users there, content keeps them. And of course, none of this matters if your website navigation is confusing or broken.
Perhaps you think now: "Hey, I have good organic positions, I spent a huge budget on ads, and I don't have clients." Now you are sure it's time to write to me. Now you are sure that talking about the speed and quality of displaying the website is so important.
