Dramatic Mobile Websites Increase In Just Two Months

mobile friendly websites

April 21, 2015 – many website owners probably circled this date on their calendar with a big, black marker. This was the day that Google released their significant new mobile-friendly ranking algorithm. Even though this is going to take about a week to roll out, website owners were not going to take any chances.

What the update meant

Because of the significance of the update, there were already a variety of names that people were using to refer to it. Some of the names that have come across were mobocalypse, mopocalypse, mobilepocalyse, or mobilegeddon. Whatever people call it, Simply put, this was going to make a drastic difference in how your website was going to rank in the immediate future. This lead to people wanting to make immediate changes as far as their websites were concerned.

The reason that Google was making these changes was because they wanted to encourage website owners to realize that the future of the Internet was going to be mobile. They hope that more and more websites are going to be mobile friendly in the future.

A change of almost 5 percent

This new mobile update caused many webmasters to make their site more mobile friendly. According to Google, there was a 4.7 percent mobile websites increase for mobile-friendly websites compared to just two months ago. An increase of almost 5 percent across the web is going to mean a significant amount of updated websites.

To be honest, the almost 5 percent sounds a little low at first, but you have to consider that Google has a massive index of web pages. There are likely to be a large number of websites that no one is currently maintaining or updating, but are still online for some reason or another. This means that the update amongst active websites is probably going to be much higher.

Looking towards the future

Something that is certainly of interest to anyone involved in SEO or search engine marketing is how many more sites will go mobile friendly in the immediate future. Even the mainstream news was covering the update, which probably helped with the increase somewhat.

How to prepare for this on your own website

If you have your own website and want to test whether Google is going to consider your webpage to be mobile friendly, you can use the Mobile-Friendly Test tool from Google. This is going to tell you what Google thinks of mobile accessibility of your website. If Google says your website is not very mobile friendly, chances are that you have to make some changes in the near future.

Those who do not take it seriously may suffer

Some website owners are not taking the update seriously, taking a laid-back, “see what happens first” approach to the entire situation. The truth is that if those website owners are going to see a drastic decrease in website traffic (especially in mobile traffic mind you), chances are that they will start to realize just how serious Google is about getting people interested in a mobile-friendly Internet.