Why Does Mobile Usability Report Matter?
Since July 1, 2019, Google commenced using Mobile-first indexing, meaning that Google is using the mobile version of the content for website indexing and ranking in its search results. Google used to index primarily the desktop version of a website page’s content in evaluating the relevance of a page to a user’s search query. As the majority of users are using their mobile devices to access the information over the internet; resultingly, Googlebot is crawling and indexing website pages with the smartphone agent.
What Are Common Mobile Usability Errors?
There can be several factors that become a primary source of mobile usability errors; however, the following are the most prominent ones:
Incompatible plugins installation/configuration
Plugins are enhancing functionality and facilitating the website developers to integrate complicated features into the website framework without much hassle, especially for WordPress, etc. The website developers need to look for the plugins which are compatible with their websites to make them more safe and practical. Several plugins destroy the user’s session and experience by triggering technical errors. Google is recommending that web developers should fix and redesign their web pages while using modern web technologies gaining firm support from search browsers.
Viewport issues
Some of the websites face viewport issues as the web pages do not define a viewport property telling the browsers how to adjust the pages’ dimension and scale them out to fit in the viewport of the device on which they are being rendered. As visitors are browsing the web pages while using different devices ranging from large desktop monitors to tablets and small smartphones, the web developers should specify a viewport using the meta viewport tag and responsive website design techniques.
Viewport not set to “device-width”
“Device-width” property is critical for making a website responsive and a fixed-width viewport property indicates that the viewport it can’t adjust for different screen sizes used by the visitors. Responsive design can solve this problem, and setting the viewport to match the device’s width and scaling it to the viewport of the devices make the pages responsive.
Content wider than screen
If the content of a webpage is wider than the screen on which it is being rendered, the Search Console can give the error showing the error “content is wider than screen.” The web developers can easily fix this issue by using relative width and position values for CSS elements and making sure the images can scale as well.
Text too small to read
The webmaster can find another kind of error in their Mobile Usability Error Report in Google Search Console showing the pages where the font size for the page is too small to be legible and would require mobile visitors to “pinch to zoom” in order to read. Setting the font sizes to scale properly within the viewport can solve this problem.
Clickable elements too close together
The website developers often forget to add an adequate space between the clickable elements on the website page. This error occurs more where the “button” and “link” tags are used on the webpage. Search Console can show the URLs for the website pages where touch elements are so close to each other that a mobile user cannot easily tap a desired element with their finger without also tapping a neighbouring element. The website developers should use properly sized and spaced elements that can enhance the mobile users’ experience.
As Google looks at the mobile version of the website page. it has become vital to make the website mobile user-friendly and free from all common mobility usability errors.
