Is your website ready for mobile-first indexing?

Google announced last November that it is moving to a mobile-first index. That sounds like jargon, but the practical change is significant: Google will look at the mobile version of your site to decide how to rank you, not the desktop version. The rollout is gradual, but every site will be affected eventually.

What does mobile-first indexing actually mean?

For years, Google has crawled the desktop version of a website and used that as the authoritative source. If your mobile site had less content, hidden sections, or different markup, that did not really matter — the desktop site was the one being ranked.

Under mobile-first indexing, that flips. If your mobile site is missing content, has different structured data, or loads slower than the desktop equivalent, those are the signals Google uses. Mobile users already make up more than half of search traffic in most markets, and Google is aligning its index with that reality.

Three things to check now

• Content parity: every paragraph, image, heading and bit of structured data on desktop should also be present on mobile. Hidden or "load more" content counts, but only if it is in the HTML at crawl time.
• Mobile page speed: a slow mobile site is now a slow site, full stop. Run a few of your key pages through Google's PageSpeed Insights and look at the Mobile column.
• Navigation and internal links: make sure the same links exist in the mobile menu and that key landing pages are no more than three clicks deep on mobile.

You probably do not need a separate mobile site

If you are on a responsive site that serves the same HTML to every device, you are most of the way there. The pages that get caught out are those running a separate m. subdomain, or those that hide chunks of content on small screens for design reasons.

If you would like a sanity check on whether your site is ready, get in touch — we can run a short audit and tell you whether there is anything to fix before the index update reaches you.