Is it optional to create a mobile-friendly app with 55% of mobile users on the Internet? No? You are right! These statistics also show that how usage patterns are changing and the requirements for businesses and content creators to adapt to these changes by creating mobile friendly test scenarios.
What happens if you don’t do so? You will risk losing a massive portion of possible users and also a large section of your revenue. To avoid this process, you can use various tools that are easily available in the market, which will help you to diagnose, troubleshoot, and optimize your website for a better end-user experience.
Unfamiliar with mobile-friendly testing tools? Don’t worry! We are here for you. Our guide will unfold the importance of mobile-friendliness and all the features that you must look for while choosing your preferred mobile-friendly testing tools. We’ll also help you establish a baseline in this regard by going through some of the most popular tools that are currently available in the market.
Why Mobile-Friendliness Matters
Before we start discussing all the tools required to implement mobile-friendliness of modern web apps, we must have a clear understanding that why should we even bother about it in the first place. Apart from the evolving standards of the Internet, mobile friendliness of applications also helps you to adapt to the changing user behaviors.
To further shed more light over this segment, let us go through some of the major factors that justify the importance of implementing mobile-friendliness:
Increasing Mobile Users
Smartphones and mobile phones have become a very important part of our daily lives. So, it is only common to assume that the end users will be most probably using these portable devices to access your web applications on the go. Therefore, if you fail to implement mobile friendliness, you will see that the bounce rates will massively increase on your web application and users will find better options.
SEO Benefits
Recently, popular search engines like Google have adopted a mobile-first ranking approach. In this approach, it primarily ranks the mobile websites to implement its crawlers and indexing tools. Therefore if your application isn’t designed for mobile devices, there is a very high possibility that you will not be ranked properly on these search results. Therefore the visibility and revenue of your application will take a massive hit in this regard.
User Experience and Conversion Rates:
By implementing a mobile-friendly website, you can ensure that your customers can smoothly navigate, read content, and take desired actions by filling out forms or making a purchase. On the other hand, poor mobile designs will severely affect the conversion rates as users will face difficult navigation, unreadable text, or awkward design layouts.
Brand Reputation
Finally, your brand reputation will also take a hit if your applications are not accessible on mobile devices. This is because a website which feels dated or is difficult to use on mobiles will tarnish your image in this modern environment. Factors like these will also have a direct impact on building trust and loyalty among your target users.
We can summarize this entire segment and say that mobile-friendliness is important because it will directly affect your website’s discoverability, brand reputation, and long-term goals.
Top Mobile-Friendly Test Tools
Below, we have mentioned some of the most effective yet user-friendly tools to understand and improve the mobile performance of your web applications. Each of these tools has been carefully chosen to serve almost all the use cases that can arise in this segment:
1. Google Mobile-Friendly Test Tool
When we’re on the topic of mobile-friendliness, it is very important to have Google’s approval. So, you must consider using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool, as it is a free and straightforward way to verify the website’s compatibility with multiple mobile devices.
This tool will also help you understand the design and performance of multiple elements present on the app. Let us divert our attention towards some of the major features of this tool:
This tool will help you enter a URL and will provide a simple yes or no vote within just a few seconds along with multiple screenshots. These screenshots will mostly help you understand how Googlebot will view this page.
It also has specific error messages if clickable elements are too close together or if the page content is wider than the target screen.
Finally, it will also provide direct links to deeper insights and troubleshooting steps to further understand various key metrics related to mobile friendliness.
2. LambdaTest
Although LambdaTest isn’t a dedicated mobile-friendly testing tool, we have mentioned it as you can use LambdaTest to execute automated mobile testing with tools like Appium. At its core, LambdaTest is an AI-powered test orchestration and execution platform that lets you perform manual and automation testing at scale with over 3000 real devices, browsers, and OS combinations.
You can also use LambdaTest as a responsive checker, as it will help you understand how the website layouts, interactive elements, and fonts change depending on the screen sizes and mobile devices. After running all the testing processes, LambdaTest will generate a multimedia-rich test report to find and debug the faulty elements.
3. Bing Mobile Friendliness Tool
Bing also has a significant share of the market in terms of search engines. Therefore, this tool is equally important as it will provide a slightly different perspective, mainly focusing on how Microsoft search engine will interpret your website.
4. PageSpeed Insights
Google PageSpeed Insights, built on the Lighthouse engine, will help you understand the performance of both the mobile and desktop versions of your website. It also provides various deep insights in terms of performance, accessibility, best practices, and SEO metrics for your web application.
5. GTmetrix
This tool mainly focuses on performance metrics for both desktop and mobile apps. Although, it is not a typical mobile friendliness verification tool but its insights into speed and structure will be important for mobile optimization processes.
Common Issues In Mobile Web Apps
While implementing mobile friendliness on your applications, you will encounter certain common scenarios that might delay the testing and final deployment processes. To shed more light over these segments, we have mentioned some of the major challenges along with their most prominent solutions:
- The most common issue is slow loading time due to large images, inefficient code, too many HTTP requests, or lack of caching. You can easily solve this problem by compressing the images, minifying the CSS elements, or enabling browser caching. You can also consider using Content Delivery Networks to locally store the commonly used user information.
- In certain cases, tiny fonts or unoptimized UI layouts can force the users to always zoom-in on the application. To solve this issue, you can consider using responsive design frameworks like Bootstrap and also defining font sizes in relative units example, rem or em. It is also equally important to test all these fonts on multiple screen sizes.
- If you place multiple buttons and links too close to each other, it can give rise to scenarios when the user accidentally clicks on them. The most effective solution to this is adding spacing around clickable elements or abiding by the recommended guidelines like 44px by 44px touch target.
- Finally, you can encounter issues when multimedia elements won’t play on certain devices, or the resources get completely blocked by robots.txt. To solve this problem, you must use HTML5 video instead of a Flash Player. You should also audit the robots.txt for ensuring important resources are easily crawlable.
Tips for Maintaining Mobile Friendliness Over Time
Finally, you must understand that creating a mobile-friendly website isn’t the end of your task. You must also have the long-term picture in your mind and understand that the application will go through several updates which will impact the mobile-friendliness of all its elements. So, we suggest the testers to implement the following parameters to ensure mobile friendliness overtime:
- The first practice must be to perform regular testing using your preferred tool, as it will help you find various regressions or new issues which might pop up after adding new features or removing the existing ones.
- You should also remember that new technologies, trends, and best practices will continue to come into the market every year. Therefore, it becomes very important to stay updated with all these new additions to ensure that you are providing the best experience to your customers in the competitive segment.
- In case you plan to make a significant change to the application, you must test it in a staging environment before pushing it live. This approach will help you to avoid breaking the entire mobile friendly environment.
- It is very important to pay proper attention to various metrics like bounce rates, conversation duration, and conversion rates, especially for mobile users. Any sudden change within these metrics will help you understand new issues that might appear in the infrastructure of the application.
- We recommend the testers to understand that many mobile-friendly principles also have a role in improving the accessibility of the application. For instance, you must ensure proper color contrast, text-to-background ratios, and navigation structures to get started with this process.
- Finally, we recommend the testers to use progressive web applications as they provide app-like experiences directly from the mobile browser. Although it will not be the most prominent solution for all websites, it can be a very effective and powerful way to improve the engagement of your customers.
The Bottom Line
Based on all the factors that we put forward in this article, we can easily say that ensuring the website is mobile-friendly is very important in terms of modern web development and digital marketing. This is because it will have a direct role in improving your search engine rankings, user satisfaction, and business goals.
All the tools that we have put forward in this article will help you find crucial mobile-based issues and also resolve them to implement meaningful improvements within the core infrastructure of the application.
While implementing these practices, you must remember that your final goal isn’t to just pass a test but to offer a truly smooth, quick, and pleasant experience which will force your visitors to come back to your website. So, whether you are an individual developer or part of a large organization, you must adapt these practices and tools to improve the success of your brand in this mobile-first ecosystem.
