Today I’m going to talk about mobile optimization and the reason is simple: Google today has come out with a new algorithm update which may impact the position of your website in the SERPS. Google has announced that 40% of all website on the internet are not mobile friendly. HOLY MOLY! That means there’s nearly a 1/2 chance that your website is not mobile optimized.

This is very important because your customers need a mobile experience, and you’re probably not providing it for them. I wanted to give some advice on how to make sure your website is mobile optimized, and of course if you ever feel up to the smart investment of having your website built by professionals, just hire us and check out our portfolio over at WebDesignMarketer.com.

First of all when you’re making your website to be mobile optimized, be sure to specify the size of everything from images, videos and audio players to be in percentages instead of pixels. The difference is, if you have an image with a width of 1000px, it might show up correctly on a desktop but on certain mobile devices it’s not going to look well.

The way to get around this would be to change the width to 100% so no matter what device you’re on, it will show up correctly. The easiest way to specify the height is to set it to “auto”. That way even your MyFlashStore player, Soundcloud players or images can all look right no matter what device you’re on.

The tool linked above is a good one for checking whether your website is mobile-optimized in Google’s eyes. As you can see from the screenshot my website is indeed mobile friendly, and it is mobile friendly because it’s responsive in nature.

Responsive is a word used to describe a website built in pretty much nothing but percentages. Depending on what device you’re on, the website will actually change the size of everything from the header to the body. It will change the position of the sidebar as well which has a huge effect on how the website looks.

Making a website responsive, in my opinion, is the best way to do design because it enables your customers to have a similar experience to their desktop experience regardless what kind of device they are on.

However another way to do this is to install a mobile optimization plugin, which there are plenty out there for WordPress available. A mobile plugin usually will not do all the work for you, so there will still be some things necessary to do in order to make it work for you. But a mobile plugin can help you create a completely different website for mobile users only.

There are pros and cons to this, truthfully I wouldn’t trust my entire website’s mobile experience to a single plugin which may or may not function as well as you need it to. Plugins in general are a risky business, or can be, because they can make your site crash if they’re not set up correctly.

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If you want further tips and information, tools and resources on how to build your website, then purchase the course linked here. We’ve gone to great lengths to make sure the course covers everything you need to build a website easily and without much technical knowledge at all.

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